Critics reviews

Movies that leave you a little confused, leaning in and projecting yourself onto the characters, are often the best ones, and the cinema of drudgery can engage that impulse like few others... There’s a familiarity to the way [Sometimes I Think About Dying] renders everyday life: as a cell, in which a woman has stripped herself of choice and possibility in order to survive.

Though at times “Sometimes I Think About Dying” gets a little dull, the central situation maintains its grip. The filmmaker gets us to care, which is no small thing. I like what the movie shows us. I just wanted a little more.

For all its morbidness, Rachel Lambert’s new film is a gentle reverie about human connection. It’s a little haunting, but in a way that’s pensive and introspective instead of actually chilling... It’s a movie made up of quiet moments: pauses in conversation, lingering glances, and outstretched hands. Lambert emphasizes the importance of these small interactions, and the ways they build up to connections. It’s a quiet story that aches in the best sort of way.

“Sometimes I Think About Dying” is but a snapshot of a mental-health drama, wrapped up in a more traditional love story that sparks rumination on the challenges of connecting with others... Lambert juxtaposes images and sound to craft [a] strange brew of warring emotional tones.

There's something refreshing about a film not feeling the pressure to explain... "Sometimes I Think About Dying," directed in an intriguing style by Rachel Lambert, operates on this principle, and is mostly successful.

Perhaps the biggest complaint with Sometimes I Think About Dying is that it feels overlong at 91 minutes — there’s no real market for 60-minute movies (beyond, of course, TV pilots) but the story it’s telling doesn’t need as much screen time as it has.

[Sometimes I Think About Dying] reveals itself not as just another tale of the alienating effects of computer spreadsheets and email inboxes, but as a heartwarming story about reconnecting to the world.

Sometimes I Think About Dying is a dark comedy of restraint and quiet, but that silence holds an incredible amount of power and emotion. Ridley gives what might be her best performance, and Lambert knows exactly how to balance the delicate mood of the film.

[Ridley's is] a performance that’s so far afield of the loud flash and melodrama of Star Wars that [the actress] seems almost introduced anew. She shows a maturity befitting her age, which perhaps serves as subtle advertisement to future collaborators that Ridley is no longer just the plucky heir to Luke Skywalker... [Even as the film is] some nice tailoring that doesn’t quite make a complete garment, it’s nonetheless a sturdy enough showcase for Ridley, who I’d love to see in many more offbeat projects like this in the future.

Although not feeling fully formed with its emotionally rushed finale, Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying is a humorously droll, narratively restrained look at the feigned personalities of workplace office culture and the social anxieties of being forced into such spaces.

Ridley does fine work with even the smallest of movements, all the better to key us into what Fran is thinking. With a tiny shake of the head here, a too-long blink there, all zeroed in on with careful close-ups shots, we can’t help but be part of her world.

Lambert’s skill at stating the film’s surreal moments is genuinely impressive. She collaborates with cinematographer Dustin Lane and art director Robert Brecko to stage images that stick with you long after you leave the theater. But, outside of a showcase moment for Ridley in the movie’s third act, there isn’t much else that does.