Which is why I’m delighted to say that the film is now streaming on MUBI — a place to discover great, ambitious cinema, from emerging auteurs to iconic directors. They distributed our darlings Aftersun and Souvenir Part II and have recently put out Die My Love, It Was Just An Accident, The Mastermind and Sentimental Value (Trier gang rise up!!).

You can get 30 days of free streaming at mubi.com/finalscene 🔗

This is also why I was equally thrilled when the TFS Reader Hotline1 landed a voice note about the film. , a super thoughtful supporter of the newsletter, sent it to me a few weeks ago. He wanted to talk about a specific scene in Sentimental Value — and not one of the obvious ones.

Edited transcript:

“The scene that really triggered me was when Rachel Kemp goes to Gustav Borg’s house and withdraws from the film. She says she doesn’t want to disappoint him. He answers that she doesn’t. They hug and she cries. That scene really hit me hard — even harder than the typical scenes that make people cry in this movie — because of that feeling of realizing: this isn’t your story to tell. That even though it resonates with you, you’re not the vessel for this art to be made. It’s someone else’s story. You’re merely a witness to it. An important witness, but a witness all the same.”

Hernando, I swear I grinned when your voice note started. I love movies and I love talking about movies, but I also love when I hear someone else nail a feeling I’ve been fumbling for words on. Sentimental Value is a film I adore but I also don’t think about often because when I do, I get weirdly…sad.

Witnessing sounds soft as a word—kind, even—but it drags you into everything. It means watching, yes, but also carrying, feeling, knowing. Folding yourself into another’s story without folding them into yours. It’s holding space without elbowing in, telling without owning. And god, the power packed into that. But you have to watch yourself. Witness too hard and it slides into possession, the story no longer theirs but yours to flaunt or fix. Then comes the dull throb of adjacency—a slow, persistent pain that says, I care too much, and that very caring marks me as the outsider, the one who shouldn’t have to bear the weight. This half-step, this delicate overreach, that’s Rachel’s entire orbit in Sentimental Value.

There’s also so many questions around the ethics of proximity — too close and you’re just a gossip with a press pass, too far and you’re a clueless bystander playing at empathy. Access journalism thrives on this confusion. Like every acting teacher screams at you in week one: you nail a role by inhabiting it, then ditch the ego long enough to let the character breathe outside your control.

But what happens when you’re only meant to witness? I’ve started to feel a strange combination of comfort and despair in the movies that seem to be circling the same question — what does it mean to be someone who spends all their time witnessing, understanding, lovingly attaching themselves to stories that aren’t theirs?

Nobody’s named this feeling yet, and I’d like to try. I want to think through its privilege and its danger alongside Rachel Kemp’s Sentimental Value — the story of a woman whose power is the ability to see.

Shall we do it together?

a surrogate is not the same thing as a muse, gustav

Much of the critical conversation around Sentimental Value has fixated on the family drama—the sisters, the absent father, the ancestral wounds tangled with Norwegian resistance lore and a grandmother’s suicide—and sure, that reading is correct. But it’s also incomplete. The film’s true engine is Rachel Kemp, the American actress who barely belongs to this lineage yet dismantles it from the inside out. Elle Fanning embodies her with such urgency you’re yanked closer to the screen—only to lose yourself so utterly that leaning back feels like forgetting you ever moved at all.

We meet Rachel at the Deauville Film Festival, where a retrospective of Gustav Borg's early work is screening. She has come from the universe of blockbuster YA franchises — famous, yes, but carrying the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has been successful at the wrong things. Rachel watches one of Gustav's old films and something in it reaches her. She invites him to dinner with her entourage. He offers her the role his own daughter refused. And Netflix, sniffing the scent of headline-grabbing chemistry, agrees to finance the whole thing. From the first frame, this looks like a meeting of artistic kindred spirits. It is already an arrangement built on asymmetric need: Rachel wants artistic legitimacy. Gustav wants a surrogate. The transaction is invisible to both of them, which is what makes it so effective.

Then the preparation begins, and this is where Trier starts tightening the screws. Gustav isn’t just coaching Rachel—he’s remaking her, sculpting Nora’s body language, her pauses, her inflections, like a puppeteer abusing strings that only look delicate. Some critics flagged this as a Bergman-esque touch, though I didn’t see many directly making the connection to Persona: One woman forced to dissolve into another under a patriarch’s cold eye.

It’s the sadism of a Bergman character, paternal and possessive, ready to consume the daughter to feed the art. The hair-dyeing is an inkblot of violence, bleeding under Rachel’s skin before the psychological guillotine falls. He then gets the script translated from Norwegian to English for Rachel—a concession that both he and Rachel know is wrong. She can’t speak Norwegian. It’s the same language of manipulation that gets fathers in trouble with their daughters.

The rehearsal scene is where the film's central dramatic irony becomes visible. Rachel performs a monologue from Gustav's script — a passage about crisis, loneliness, and a desperate prayer for home:

Gustav, clinging to his role as patriarch, suddenly taps into something real in her — which is just terrifying, because she’s really good. She’s a great actress, and that’s part of what makes her imaginative approximation so dangerous.

Rachel’s frozen walls start to crack. The story she’s been stuck in, the father’s secret ache—it all bubbles up just beneath the surface. Even the English sounds off; she hears it. She smells Gustav’s distractions, knows Nora’s shadow haunts every line, and that the entire project is his petition for his daughter’s forgiveness. Rachel is conscientious, conflicted, and a little like Gustav: ego-driven, but not without warmth and grace.

Rachel walks up to Gustav’s home. The foliage is expansive and lush, there’s a white picket fence, and the green of the trees provide a perfect backdrop for Rachel’s white dress. This is a woman who is a pure romantic at heart, but she’s also very American—in all of the ways that you might expect, but also in her frankness. She’s bracingly direct. She cuts through all the wry Nordic reserve in a way that feels ungrateful, but that is, of course, American. (I say this as a non-American of a skeptical and pessimistic disposition who goes to Nordstrom Rack every time she’s in New York).

Rachel tells Gustav she is withdrawing. She says she just doesn't want to let him down. She says it doesn't feel right.

"You asked me to dye my hair the same colour as your daughter. And, I mean, you don't want this film to be in English, do you?"

Rachel represents everything Nora resents. She is the Americanized blonde, the daughter who is willing to bend to her father’s will, the daughter who is willing to play the role that has been forced upon her. Nora is estranged in more ways than one: she has cut her father out of her life, which is what a good daughter would do, but she’s also cut him out of her work and her art. She’s an artist who refuses to be a daughter—in her work and in her life. Rachel is a daughter who is willing to be an artist, and that’s why she was chosen. But this, too, has its limits.

Gustav's response is the closest the film comes to grace: "Please, don’t look back at this as a failure. You’re a great actress, I meant it."

This exchange is deceptively understated, but the scene’s power comes from the mutual generosity between them. According to Elle Fanning, Rachel is the “catalyst” of the film—unburdened by decades of resentment, she sees Gustav and his family dynamics with a clarity that they cannot reach themselves. And when she walks away, it’s a dare: forcing Gustav to reckon with the truth he’s been dodging—wanting his daughter’s participation is, in fact, wanting her forgiveness.

Rachel occupies a specific position—an unwilling voyeuse to something she cannot enter. But is she the only one of her kind?

the taxonomy of women who carry stories that aren't theirs

In what is perhaps the most satisfying twist of Sentimental Value, she isn’t. She’s a type. And it wasn’t until I read Holocaust scholar and psychiatrist Dani Laub’s insightful work on the subject of witnessing that I realised just how many films had quietly placed their Rachel Kemp in Laub’s impossible position of the witness.

In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Laub delineates three distinct levels of witnessing:

• Being a witness to oneself within the experience

• Being a witness to the testimonies of others

• Being a witness to the process of witnessing itself

His core insight is simple: Witnessing is never neutral. Proximity to another’s suffering creates its own form of wound. You don’t have to live the experience to be marked by it. To be adjacent to it is to be in a position that is not only moral and psychological, but one that is impossible.

Rachel is a witness to Gustav’s grief and pain, but she is also a witness to herself as an actor, as a woman, as a lover, as a friend. She looks through the camera lens, watches footage of herself and Gustav, and sees herself witness herself. She can’t escape it, and maybe that’s why she’s drawn it so forcefully. But the cost is heavy. Carrying the weight of someone else’s grief is a heavy burden, and when you’ve created a character who, like Rachel, is as empathetic and attuned to sadness as she is, it becomes even heavier. She has to find a way to express that burden through her body, as well as the sadness she’s creating every time she steps on stage.

I've started to notice Rachel everywhere, now that I'm looking. I went back through everything I'd watched in the last few years and found her sitting in the corner of film after film, slightly outside the main action.

Aftersun has adult Sophie going back through the MiniDV footage of that holiday in Turkey, 1999. She has Calum on tape asking her to tell her mum she misses her. She has him on a sun lounger. She has the particular way he holds a towel. Wells cuts between this footage and strobe-lit rave sequences where adult Sophie stands motionless in a crowd while her father moves somewhere in the dark just out of reach — and the film's whole argument is in that gap, which is Laub's second level: the testimony arrives after the fact, when it is completely, cosmically useless. She was eleven. She was standing right there. She just had the camera.

Past Lives goes somewhere even more airless. Celine Song has said that sitting at that bar in New York — Nora between Hae Sung and Arthur, translating between them — she realised she wasn't translating between two men but between two selves: the girl who left Seoul at twelve and the woman who stayed in New York and built a life in a language her childhood doesn't speak. Arthur tells Nora "you dream in a language I can't understand," which is shattering in the way that only accurate statements are. She's been her own witness for two decades — carrying that earlier version, that abandoned life — and still couldn't fully bury her. When she cries at the end, walking back from Hae Sung's taxi, Song is specific: it isn't grief for Hae Sung. It's grief for the twelve-year-old girl she never got to say goodbye to. Laub's first level, the most interior one — being a witness to yourself, inside the experience, in real time — and she was doing it for twenty-four years without a word for it.

Joanna Hogg's answer, in The Souvenir Part II, is to make witnessing into a graduation film — which is the logical conclusion of Laub's third level (witnessing the act of witnessing itself, turning the position into art). Julie casts an actor who doesn't look like Anthony and a producer friend who has never acted and then tries to direct her crew through grief she cannot translate into instruction, because the grief was built on a version of Anthony she had been substantially inventing since the day she met him. Her classmate Pete tells her she hasn't reconciled who Anthony was with who she loved. He is correct. It doesn't help. The graduation film she premieres looks nothing like the one she planned — brighter, stranger, Anthony resurrected and finally cooperative, Julie carrying a camera like a gun — and whether that counts as processing the wound or simply redecorating it is a question Hogg, characteristically, leaves entirely open.

withdrawal as an act of grace

I dust off the pile of notes I’ve made on involuntary witness research and all the ways that witnessing can be significant without being transformative. I can’t find words for being a witness by necessity, bound to the event by your own existence but compelled to do nothing.

You understand what is happening in a house you do not own and have no say in the maintenance of, and your understanding is not required and is not wanted. You are close enough to be marked and to be affected but too far away to act. You are not permitted to act. You are not a bystander because bystanders have power, since they can choose to act or choose not to act. You are weightless, the witness at the back of the courtroom being marked and informed and invited and enlisted for no reason at all. But you still have that power, and that power is yours to keep.

Rachel has this and this is where Sentimental Value shows its radical streak. Because, of all the witness films I’ve discussed, it’s the only one to directly show the act of withdrawing. Aftersun ends in the ambiguity of retrospective grief. The Souvenir transforms the act of witnessing into art. Past Lives holds its characters on a never-ending hinge. Trier’s film shows a character choosing to step back, and frames that choice as the most generous thing she could do.

the ethics of celebrating a woman for knowing her place

However, here’s where we’re confronted with a new problem. If Elle Fanning herself describes Rachel as a catalyst, then we should acknowledge what a catalyst really does — it initiates chemical reactions but remain unchanged themselves. Catalysts exist to produce a reaction and then be ended, consumed. They are sacrifice. Sacrifice is the force of nature that drives the story into motion, but sacrifice is not the subject of this story. Rachel the catalyst, like all the others in this essay, is a victim of her own invisibility. Sacrifice is mouth-watering, and she exists for the appetites of others — but exactly how mouth-watering is determined by their appetites. I cannot help but be reminded of the rapacious Polyphemus from the classic Greek myth, where Odysseus’s men are consumed one by one until only the cunning Odysseus remains, clever enough to blind the creature and escape.

Sacrifice speaks only when it has been dined upon.

So if the significant witness only seems to matter in their absence — then what are we exactly celebrating here? Is this ethics? Or a beautifully crafted story about being expendable? It’s our job to be careful with such stories and their byproducts. As the protagonists of Aftersun, The Souvenir Part II, and Past Lives demonstrate, every story told must translate into a story lived. Each emotion felt has consequence. No presence can be truly insignificant. What are we saying when we shove Rachel Kemp into a category defined by absence and void? What are we saying when we glorify her wisdom and her courage? Do we not risk romanticising the absence itself?

These dangers are real and I know it. To romanticise absence is to align with an othering logic that valorises female pain, that frames lack as an invitation for reverence. To make martyrdom a female privilege is to assert, yet again, that suffering is the price women must pay for wisdom, for duty, for insight into the dark machinations of the world. And the absence of a name is not a reason to celebrate Rachel’s position. It’s a reason to look at it closely and understand it without adornment or glamour.

So what do I do with Rachel Kemp, resting that way in my hands, suspended between the need to protect her and the need to honor her withdrawal? I spoon her up in beautiful prose, large and unfurling, her body stretching out my sentences before reaching the edge of this essay. She deserves beautiful, I write. She’s a star, after all, the brightest light in a dark film, carving space for herself when no one else will. I refuse to make that beautiful, but equally, I refuse to look away. If I push her from the centre to the periphery, then I risk obscuring the brilliance of the wound she carries. That is also violence, and I want no part in it.

Rachel is an aspiring artist who aches to be taken seriously, to be not just part of the machine but the reason the machine moves — we know her. We have been her. And yet, maybe more than any other character I’ve written about, she has felt like a kind of avatar for me. As a cultural critic, this job is witnessing by design. You crawl inside other people’s stories as completely as you can, you understand them better than anyone else who saw the same movie, better than the people who made it, and then you write it down and step away, letting the work go on without you. The understanding is real. The authority is retrospective, and is sometimes at odds with the visceral experience.

Because this is the thing about witnessing and then walking away when you realize a story isn’t yours: It happens all the time. You’ve been the friend who watched a relationship implode in excruciating slow motion — you saw the whole thing coming, you knew every line of the argument they were going to have, and you said nothing because it wasn’t your relationship and your clarity was not useful, it was just yours to carry. You’ve been in love with someone whose heart was already somewhere else and you understood it before they did, which is a particular kind of awful. You’ve sat at a party reading the entire subtext of the room — who hates who, what’s not being said, which couple is six weeks from ending — and you’re not even in the actual conversation. You’re always just outside the thing.

In these situations, most of us choose to either overstay or disappear altogether. In our desperation for meaning or closure, we try to assert our own significance in a narrative that has moved on without us, like an orphaned child still reaching for their mother’s hand. Or we shrink away entirely and hope to be forgotten.

The more interesting move— the thing I want to close with, and the one Rachel makes—is one of rare ethical intelligence. It’s the thing that requires the most bravery, and least self-indulgence. It’s the thing that is most often considered rude or callous. Rachel matters not despite her replaceability, but because of it, and because she knows it.

She comes to Gustav’s door in person, says it to his face, and leaves. Not because it’s easy or graceful—Rachel is crying when she says this to Gustav— but because the alternative is a worse type of dishonesty. It’s what he tells her, before she walks out for the last time: “Most actors would do the role even if it felt wrong. Or just leave, and let the agents sort it out. But you came here. You’re a good person.”

Sentimental Value is now streaming on MUBI, and you can get 30 days free at mubi.com/finalscene 🫶🏻

This week’s submissions come from long-time reader, first time “caller” . This man has been through it, folks. From the depths of Terrence Malick-induced despair to the heights of Ted Lasso-inspired ugly crying, he's run the gamut of movie-related emotions. And lucky for us, he's decided to bare his soul on the Hotline for the world to see.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Sophie, aren’t you supposed to be providing some kind of insightful commentary on Matthew’s journey? Some grand philosophical musing on the nature of art and the human experience?”

And to that I say: bold of you to assume I have any insights to offer. I’m just here to make Tarantino jokes and project my own issues onto unsuspecting readers.

However, my curiosity is indeed unmatched. I’m always curious to hear people’s unfiltered thoughts on films and tv shows, but most often, I feel that something’s missing — something about the way we talk about why we like something, why they have a special place in our heart, and what that implies about us. I think we sometimes forget to discuss the effect that movies have on us, the changes they inspire, the things we process because of them, and the meaning we find through them.

This month’s submissions, coupled with my response, are all about that effect. And if reading about Matthew's breakdowns or my own rambling attempts at profundity makes you feel even a tiny bit less alone in your own struggles? Well, that's all any of us can really ask for.

So here’s to the movies that move us, the stories that shape us, and the Hotline confessions that remind us of the strange, sweet relief of feeling fully seen by another human being.

May we all be so lucky.

From :

PLOT ARMOR

Knight of Cups’ existentialism pulls me out of my depressive spirals and helps me push my personal reset button.

SPICY TALK

I don’t understand all the fuss over PTA’s films. I’ve tried and I’m sure they’re technically brilliant if I understood that side of movies, but they definitely don’t move me.

REALITY CHECK

Arrival the movie (& many of Ted Chiang’s stories) give me perspective on life and my place within it.

Runner Up: War for the Planet of the Apes - When Woody’s “The Colonel” states he had to “sacrifice his only son so that humanity could be saved” made me see some of my previous religious beliefs in a new and strange light.

TRIGGERED

Ted Lasso Season 3 Episode 11 “Mom City”. I’ve had a difficult relationship with my mother and was not prepared for the ugly sobbing that overcame me as Ted cursed his mother out.

Sophie’s take:

Oh Matthew, you prince among men. There's so much to unpack here, so let's dive right in, shall we?

Read more

Thanks for sharing your voice with TFS this week.

Full disclosure: I debated the merits of running this one for a while. It’s not always wise to inject yourself into your newsletter, but Steven’s words were so incisive that as much as they made me uncomfortable, I felt they deserved a response. I’m conscious that Schindler’s List is an all-time favorite film for many — and I take that to heart as you can see in my response below.

SPICY TAKE

From :

My controversial opinion is that Spielberg’s celebrated Schindler’s List is an instance of Holocaust denial, and I provide an intricate argument to justify this view (it appears alongside a review of Gibson's Passion of Christ where I argue that the Three Stooges put Mel on the road to Damascus).

Through the Looking Glass

Suffering Servants

The Passion of the Christ…

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Steven Aoun

From Sophie:

Read more

I’ve always believed watching a movie can change your mood. I watch You Hurt My Feelings and I’m angrier than Julia Louis-Dreyfus (my brother says I’m always angry, which is not true). Or, conversely, I watch Hoosiers and I’m like, wow, basketball is incredible! The same goes for how movies can change your perspective on the day or week you just had. Now think about what happens when you watch TWO movies back to back: we’re feeling feelings on steroids.

But back to bu$ine$$ with this edition’s TFS Hotline: We have a reader submission about this concept coming right up, so get excited! I know I am.

• Upgraded subscribers: You’ll get my full response to Madeleine below, plus comment access to answer this month's question: What’s the worst double bill you’ve ever sat through?

• Free subscribers: You get the submission, I get to keep my lights on, everyone wins. Upgrade if you want my response and the group therapy session in the comments.

  Subscribe now

As always, send your confessions to sophie@thatfinalscene.com or record your voice message for a chance to be featured in next month’s edition. People who send a submission get a free 3-month membership to TFS.

Here are the categories of the Hotline:

• Plot armor: The show or film that got you through a difficult time.

• Spicy take: Your most controversial film opinion that you’ll defend with your life.

• Reality check: The film or show that completely rewired your brain.

• Triggered: When something on screen or in the theater hit you unexpectedly hard.

TRIGGERED

From Madeleine:

Dear Sophie,

I’ve come across your writing recently and I really enjoy it. I too think August is one of the cruellest months...Thanks for introducing me to the David Foster Wallace speech!

When I was 17, I didn’t have that very specific curatorial instinct I have since honed, so my movie nights with my (indulgent, super film fan) dad were loosely held together double bills. One Friday night, I said we were going to do single title films set in California: Vertigo, followed by Clueless. (Now I know that this is a) totally the wrong order and b) still a valid double bill but it would need to be called Compelling California Blondes or Let’s Drive Around Real Carefully or Edith Head vs Mona May.)

At this point in my life I had seen Clueless probably 20 times and Vertigo 0. I knew it was one my dad’s favourites and he had warned me that I was going to see Jimmy Stewart in a very different light than I was used to and I might not even like the movie. He told me it was slow and cruel, and he was not wrong. I watched Kim Novak in her multiple guises; I watched James Stewart scrambling for control amongst his desire and grief; I felt Bernard Hermann’s score winding around me. And then the movie was over and my dad turned to me: what did I think? I can’t remember my answer now but it was something along the lines of: Wow that was a lot, I need a minute. So we paused before we put on Clueless.

Then we started Clueless and Cher, sporting some of cinema’s greatest hair, was driving around in glorious California sunshine like I’d seen many many times before and suddenly I could not cope. I needed my dad to turn it off, it was like we were watching Vertigo again. Thinking about it now I realise how sort of ridiculous it sounds that I was experiencing the film’s title for real, that I had been so taken aback by Hitchcock’s tricks that I had lost my (not equal to my dad maybe in terms of years but certainly up there in terms of enthusiasm and a broad education) super film fan footing.

My dad said he would think about something really different we could watch and went into the kitchen to make tea. I followed him in there and burst into tears. I’ve cried in movies before but I’ve never had a movie take over my body in quite that way. That’s what it felt like; I couldn’t control it and I couldn’t even understand why I was feeling such an intense way.

My dad says you can only watch Vertigo every five years and I agree. I’ve since seen it in the cinema, I wrote about it as part of my finals at university, and I can talk about it without breaking down. But that first experience is wired into me in a way I still don’t understand and which has not happened with any film since.

All best,

Madeleine

From Sophie:

Read more

I spend a lot of time pontificating about cinema from my couch, but your submissions remind me why I fell in love with movies in the first place: they ambush us when we least expect it.

Two lovely readers wrote about films that cracked them open at exactly the right moment. Both stories involve ugly crying in dark spaces, both involve unexpected catharsis, and both made me realize I've been approaching grief all wrong. If you've ever had a movie physically change your breathing patterns or make you set daily phone reminders about mortality, you'll recognize yourself in the following paragraphs.

Record your voice message

Email your message

TRIGGERED

From :

This one really hurt. My brother, who also happened to be my best friend, passed away suddenly in May of 2023. I was (and still am) crushed. The previous year I had started watching the BFI Top 100 movies. Every Saturday night I would sit in my darkened theatre (my garage) and watch one movie from the list in order. Sometimes I would write something about the movie, sometimes not. After my brothers death I continued to watch these classics of world cinema but I have to tell you, my heart wasn’t in it. The wound was still too fresh. But then I watched a work of art that truly devastated me, in the best way. I still have the notes so I can pinpoint the date when maybe my heart started to heal. August 12-2023.

That night I watched Pather Panchali. I had never heard of it or the director, Satyajit Ray. I love going into a movie knowing absolutely nothing about it. I don’t want to spoil the movie for you but there is a scene that is maybe one of the most painful in all of art. I ugly cried so hard and so long. It felt like my heart was being shredded. Your ancestors knew-catharsis. A cleansing. When I woke up the next morning, it felt like the first time in months I could take a deep breath. I’m not saying my grief was magically healed. What I am saying is it felt like a door had opened up a crack and there was some light that was trying to get in and was just slightly visible around the edges. Anyways that’s all I got.

From Sophie:

Nick, I'm sorry about your brother.

I've been thinking about your email for days. Initially, I wanted to reply with some analysis of Satyajit Ray's techniques or context about Pather Panchali's place in film history. But that academic bullshit would miss the actual significance of what happened to you on August 12th.

For those who haven't seen Pather Panchali (and you should), it's the first film in Ray's Apu Trilogy, shot in rural Bengal in the 1950s with non-professional actors and a microscopic budget. Ray had never directed before. The result somehow captures the raw essence of being human in ways that billion-dollar franchises can't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Films physically change us. I don't mean this metaphorically. Movies literally alter our heart rates, breathing patterns, muscle tension, hormone levels. The right film at the right moment rewires our nervous systems – something I've experienced firsthand.

I spent a lot of summers with my late granddad in his hometown, Karystos. He taught me everything from philosophy to gardening 101 to swearing in three languages. Our ritual was Sunday afternoon strolls at an old theater nearby. He smuggled in homemade spanakopita wrapped in newspaper; I'd pretend not to notice the ushers pretending not to notice.

Unlike your sudden loss, my grief came in slow motion. Dementia took my grandfather over four years. Each Skype call from London, I watched him fade by degrees. First forgetting small things, then forgetting me entirely. When I moved abroad, I already carried the unfathomable ache of losing someone still physically present. By my second semester at uni, he recognized me only as "the girl from the TV." By the third, he stopped speaking altogether.

The call finally came during finals week. I'd been expecting it, even rehearsing my reaction. This anticipatory grief should have softened the blow. It didn't. Broke and on a shitty startup job, I couldn't afford a last-minute flight home. Instead, I wandered London zombie-like while my family prepared his funeral back home. On day three of this limbo, I ducked into the Prince Charles Cinema to escape rain. They were showing Ozu's Tokyo Story. I didn’t know much about it.

The film moves quietly, deliberately. Then comes the scene where Shukichi sits alone after his wife's death. Nothing dramatic happens – just an old man kneeling alone in an empty room, fanning himself. Something inside me cracked open. I doubled over in my seat, gasping for air. My body convulsed with sobs. A woman two seats away moved farther away. The manager found me later in the bathroom, knees pulled to my chest, still crying.

He helped me to the lobby, made tea. "Lost someone recently?" he asked. I nodded. "Thought so," he said. "Happens here more than you'd think."

Before this moment, I hadn't shed a single tear about my granddad. I'd been functioning – calling relatives, arranging to fly home somehow, attending classes. My body had shut down all feeling. Ozu physically broke that shutdown with images so simple they bypassed my intellectual defenses.

Few weeks later, I scraped together enough money for a flight home for the memorial. On the plane, exhausted and fragile, I made another mistake: Pixar's Coco. During the final song sequence with the elderly woman remembering her father, I broke down again. I wish the businessman next to me silently passed me tissues and ordered me a whiskey without speaking.

I tell you this story because I recognize myself in your garage that night. That moment when grief finally catches up to you physically – the ugly crying, the gasping for air, the complete surrender. People talk about grief like it's just sadness, but it's more like drowning while everyone around you breathes normally. For months after my granddad died, I felt like I was moving underwater. Sounds muffled, movements slowed, everything happening at a distance.

This underwater feeling is exactly why Ray's film cut through for you when all those BFI classics couldn't. In Pather Panchali, Ray doesn't show you grief but he dunks you in it, holds you under until you have no choice but to feel it. Most Western cinema directors pull the camera away at crucial moments or soften painful scenes with music. Ray refuses these escape hatches. He trusts you to sit with unbearable moments, much like grief itself forces us to do. I won't spoil the specific scene you mentioned, but I completely understand why it finally broke the dam.

Thank you for sharing something so personal. If more people wrote about movies like this, as emotional life events rather than objects to be rated, film discourse would be a hell of a lot more interesting.

REALITY CHECK

From :

Dear Sophie,

My tale is one of sitting down to watch what I thought would be a brainless druggy buddy comedy and ended up making me add "It's your last day on earth" as a daily reminder into my phone. When I turned on MY OLD ASS (2024) and realized that it was set in Muskoka, Ontario (north of my hometown of Toronto) I got a little stoked for some deeply Canadian references. When the protagonist and friends set up camp to go on a wilderness mushroom trip, I thought I knew exactly what kind of film I was getting and Audrey Plaza's brand of comedy seemed to fit right in. It wasn't until halfway through the movie that I realized I had been swindled in the best way possible.

This film was actually as much about letting go as a parent as it was about coming of age. When I got to the end and realized that this was ACTUALLY a film about grief, it took me OUT. The speech the protagonist gives about not realizing when the last time that you'll ever do something as a kid is destroyed me. I got out my phone immediately, set a daily reminder to live in the moment every. damned. day. and proceeded to bawl happy / sad tears for the next thirty minutes. Not just because it moved me so much, but because I was so proud of this film I had absolutely nothing to do with. That daily reminder still pops up every morning!

From Sophie:

Oh friend - you thought you were signing up for Plaza-on-mushrooms hijinks in the Canadian woods and instead got psychological surgery without anesthesia. Welcome to the bait-and-switch film genre!

Here's the dirty secret about grief narratives: the ones that announce themselves with somber piano and rain-streaked windows are as emotionally effective as a DMV instructional video. The moment we see those rain-streaked windows and hear that first melancholy piano note, our psychic defense system springs into action like an overzealous bouncer at an exclusive club: Sorry, genuine emotion, you're not on the list tonight. We mentally prep our criticism toolkit. Noting the blue color grading, cataloging the weather-as-metaphor, measuring the exact diameter of the actor's dilated pupils during their tearful monologue.

The true subversion of My Old Ass is in its fundamental recognition that grief and joy share adjacent neural pathways. The film understands that laughter creates microscopic ruptures in our defensive architecture…tiny fissures through which authentic pathos can seep. Plaza's deadpan serves as both comedic device and Trojan horse, lulling you into receptivity before the existential payload detonates.

This misdirection works because our brains have evolved into pattern-recognition machines primed for categorical stability. When a cultural text suddenly violates its implicit contract with the viewer, morphing from stoner romp to meditations on mortality, it creates a rare form of cognitive dissonance that bypasses our usual meaning-making mechanisms. In other words, you were caught in a moment of genuine epistemological crisis. Your categories failed you, and in that failure, authentic engagement emerged.

What these bait-and-switch films get (and this is where they reveal their diabolical genius) is that modern humans have constructed psychological bunkers specifically designed to repel meaningful reflection. Sorry to Bother You offered workplace comedy before swerving into surrealist anti-capitalism. The Lobster pretended to be quirky romance until revealing itself as dystopian commentary on relationship anxiety. Even Parasite showed up wearing a black comedy disguise before transforming into a blood-soaked class warfare manifesto.

In all honesty, I’m jealous of that feeling you experienced. I can't remember the last time a film pulled that kind of switcheroo on me. Maybe I'm too media-literate for my own good, or maybe I've seen so many indie dramedies that I can spot the third-act reveal coming from the opening credits. Either way, your letter makes me want to deliberately seek out films under false pretenses. I think I'll just google "best dumb action movies" and hope one of them secretly contains a philosophical thesis on the nature of consciousness.

Next time your phone buzzes with that mortality reminder, think of it as a tiny commemoration of having been beautifully deceived. In the cacophony of notifications telling you what to buy, who to be, and how you're falling short, allowing yourself to be ambushed by unexpected meaning might be the most authentic transaction you've had in years.

And that's all for our first TFS Reader Hotline! Send your confessions to sophie@thatfinalscene.com or record your voice message for a chance to be featured in next month's edition.

And remember: People who send a submission get a free 3-month membership to TFS.

Record your voice message

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As a reminder, here are the categories of the Hotline:

• Plot armor: The show or film that got you through a difficult time. Were you watching The IT Crowd for 12 hours straight after your breakup? Did you start spending money you didn't have on clothes after watching Sex and the City because shopping felt easier than dealing with your anxiety?

• Spicy take: Your most controversial film opinion that you'll defend with your life. Think Twilight is better than The Godfather? Can't stand Meryl Streep? Give me your worst.

• Reality check: The film or show that completely rewired your brain. Did a random documentary make you realize you've been wrong about something your whole life? Has a film ever made you call someone you hadn't spoken to in years?

• Triggered: When something on screen or in the theater hit you unexpectedly hard. Did someone's phone going off in a recent viewing send you into a rage spiral? I need to hear it.

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