Sometimes I Think About Dying

1hr 34mins (12A)

Daisy Ridley romcom ★★★★

“As sales pitches go”, this film’s title is “far from a winner”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph: please could I have a ticket “for an hour-and-a-half of suicidal ideation”, and a raspberry and blackcurrant Tango Ice Blast? But Sometimes I Think About Dying “turns out to be something of a mis-sell”, for beneath its “mousy indie stylings” beats a “proudly mushy romantic-comedy heart”. Daisy Ridley stars as Fran, a cripplingly shy office worker in a “soggy Oregon port town” who spends her days “twiddling with spreadsheets” – and compulsively picturing herself meeting “sticky ends”. While gazing out of a window at a crane, for instance, “she imagines her own body being winched up”; later, she sees herself dead in a forest. Her drab and dismal existence is turned on its head, however, by the arrival of Robert (Dave Merheje), an affable new colleague who decides to woo her. Their courtship is “exhilaratingly normal” – a trip to the cinema, a boozy wink-murder evening with friends – but for Fran, it proves something far more thrilling, as she is coaxed towards a “warm, shared world into which she wouldn’t have previously dared intrude”.

It’s annoying to find yet another beautiful actress playing a non-beautiful woman, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator; still, Ridley is “excellent” in this “understated little gem” of a film. “Crucially, she always allows you to feel for a character who, in other hands, might have appeared plain cold or closed down.” Adapted from a 2013 play by Kevin Armento, this likeable film “has a slyly beguiling charm” and displays “a genuinely affecting tenderness” for its characters, said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. “It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell.”