I didn't expect much going in, honestly. But this film really crept up on me, in a way I wasn't ready for.
It's such a calm, quiet movie, and yet somehow it left me emotionally wrecked by the smallest things. Just a man living his life: reading before bed, cleaning toilets, listening to old songs in his van on the way to work. And somehow all of it starts to feel sacred. There's something almost devotional about how the film treats repetition. Not repetition as a gimmick, not "look how mundane his life is," but repetition as its own kind of poetry. The silence between his actions ends up saying more than most dialogue-heavy films manage in two hours.
It reminded me a little of Paterson, but even more stripped down. More tender, maybe, if that's the right word. Paterson still has some structure to lean on, the poems, the notebook, the little narrative beats. This one strips even that away and just trusts you to sit in the rhythm of a man's days without asking for much in return.
The dream sequences are what really got me, though. They're not stylized in that heavy-handed arthouse way where you can feel the director showing off. They're just enough: messy, fleeting, sometimes warm, sometimes distant, exactly like actual dreams tend to feel when you try to hold onto them the next morning. Half-images. A feeling more than a memory. I think that restraint is what makes them land. If they'd been more polished or symbolic, I don't think they would have hit the same way.
What I appreciated most is that the film never forces anything. It just lets things happen at their own pace, and trusts that you'll feel it when something actually shifts. So when something does happen, like the scene with his sister, it hurts in a way that sneaks up on you. Not melodramatic, not underscored with swelling music to tell you how to feel. Just quietly, painfully real. That's a hard thing to pull off, letting a scene carry weight without leaning on any of the usual tools filmmakers use to manufacture emotion.
I watched this on a slow afternoon, which honestly felt like the right way to see it. Nothing else going on, no rush to get anywhere after. And it stayed with me for days afterward, which surprised me a bit given how uneventful the actual plot is on paper. It's the kind of film that doesn't hand you anything dramatic to hold onto, and yet you leave it holding something anyway.
Mostly what it left me with was this quiet urge to slow down. Not in some big, sweeping "change your life" way, just in the small, daily sense. Pay more attention to the light through the trees. Notice the repetition in your own days instead of just tolerating it. There's a kind of dignity in the way this man moves through his routine that made me want to look a little more closely at mine.
8/10
