I once dreamed of a room with walls lined entirely with copper pipes, all of them coming together at a central spigot. The plumbing twisted and turned, connected and diverged in complex ways that made no logical sense but felt right in that dream-logic way. Water flowed continuously through the system, and I stood in the center holding a cup, catching what came out. I kept thinking, This is what it feels like to write. To create something out of the tangle. To make order from chaos.
I woke up feeling so fucking smart about this metaphor my subconscious had gifted me. Like Iâd cracked the code on creativity or something. Thatâs it. Iâm a system of pipes, and writing is just how I funnel what flows through me.
Except Iâve come to realize my pipes are running dry.
October marks one year of That Final Scene. One year of weekly newsletter drops, almost 4,000 readers, and a reservoir of words that once felt bottomless now revealing its floor. I know I should celebrate this milestone. Look at what we built together! But milestones have this nasty habit of forcing introspection when youâd rather look anywhere else.
So instead of a celebration, Iâve got something to announce: Iâm taking a hiatus.
There are things happening in my personal world right now that I canât fully shareânot because Iâm being precious, but because writing about certain struggles would mean exposing others who havenât consented to becoming characters in my public narrative. So I stand at this strange threshold, needing to explain my absence without being able to fully articulate its cause. What I can tell you is that my current existence feels like being in one of those dreams where youâre trying to run but your legs keep sinking into increasingly deeper mud.
My mum calls every day now. She doesnât say âAre you okay?â anymore because she knows Iâm not. Instead, she just says âYouâre still here.â Half question, half affirmation. And I am. Still here. But a version of me thatâs fading around the edges, turning transparent in places where I used to be solid.
The world, our society, our governments â they all feel too heavy to carry alongside my own life. My thoughts on media consolidation flow through platforms owned by the very conglomerates I critique. Media companies consume each other like capitalist ouroboros (I see you, Warner Bros). Our phones ping with notifications about both nuclear threats and 20% off sales at Sephora with identical urgency. My personal worries on what happens to film criticism when algorithms determine which stories matter.
Add to that the bullshit expectation to excel at your career, be a full-time content creator, build a personal brand, master AI before it replaces you, somehow survive inflation with your pathetic salary, maintain perfect relationships, contribute to society but also have time for yourself, stay on top of your feed, eat like you care about living, exercise like death will come tomorrowâall at once, all the time. Overwhelm has become my permanent state.
Now youâll tell me, hey why are you such a downerâand the reality is Iâm really struggling to get out of this mindset when Iâm so preoccupied with these macro realities colliding with my micro reality. Under such conditions, my sentences form differently. They carry a brittleness. They snap when pressure applies. They refuse the natural musicality that once made my writing feel less like work and more like water.
Unlike other writers who find joy in regular writing, writing âon scheduleâ creates anxiety within me. First it comes as a certain type of anxiety â the good kind, if such a thing exists. The kind that keeps you noticing things, collecting moments and ideas like smooth stones you might need later. Iâll use this. And this. And this too. Your brain becomes a magpie, drawn to anything that glitters with potential. But for that bouncing to happen every week, Iâve realized I need to exist in a constant state of anxiety. And right now, Iâm anxiety-saturated. Depleted. Suddenly Iâm not collecting becauseI want to, but because I have to. My cup doesnât runneth over â itâs perpetually empty, desperately needing to be filled by Thursday so you can publish on Friday.
And when you reach that point, the writing changes. The voice changes.
You change.
I used to think writers were different from other artists. That we could produce endlessly because our raw material, words, ideas, observations, was infinite. Thereâs always another sentence to craft, another perspective to explore.
THE HUBRIS.
Words may be infinite, but the self that arranges them is not. The self that infuses them with meaning needs care and rest and silence. The self needs to experience without immediately translating the experience into content.
Iâve started to call this the need to âfill the cisternâ in my journals â allowing life to accumulate in you before attempting to draw from it in your work. Iâve come to believe these periods of semi-despair are natural. To be accepted, not fought.
Iâve forcing words through arid pipes, performing enthusiasm when all I felt was depletion.
That ends today.
When I started That Final Scene, I had a theory that great criticism exists at the intersection of art and life. That the most resonant writing about film doesnât just analyze whatâs on screen but examines how it reflects and refracts our lived experience.
I still believe this. But posting every week because This Is What Youâre Supposed To Do is not the way. Thereâs no joy in the expectation to have smart, nuanced takes on new releases when I can barely focus long enough to follow a plot.
Sometimes the most honest thing a writer can do is stop writing for a bit.
Despite this, and since weâre self-reflecting on my 1-year anniversary over here, this past year taught me things about building a newsletter that might help others walking this path. So hereâs some of the stuff I wish someone had told me before I started this journey:
Vulnerability isnât a strategy, itâs a necessity. When I wrote about my familyâs situation in 2008 through the lens of Margin Call, that piece resonated not because it was clever, but because it was true.
Consistency matters, but quality trumps frequency. The essays you shared most werenât necessarily the weekly staples, but the ones that took me two weeks to write when I gave myself permission to break my schedule.
Loyal readers form around resonance, not algorithms. You all found me because something I wrote struck a chord in you, not because I gamed a system.
Consistent time slots create psychological contracts. When I once published at 5pm instead of my usual 2.30pm, I got worried emails asking if I was okay. Readers build their routines around yours in ways youâll never fully understand. They shower with your words in their head. They save you for their lunch break. They read you before bed. Recognize the intimacy of that arrangement.
Newsletters have emotional weather patterns. I tracked my open rates obsessively for months before noticing they followed a distinct emotional cycle rather than topic preferences. Essays about joy or rage performed equally well. Essays written from a place of mild interest or intellectual distance bombed consistently. Readers can feel when youâre fully present and when youâre going through the motions.
The comments section is a thermometer, not a compass. Reader feedback is invaluable, but the moment I started steering by it, my writing lost its center. The most insightful comments often came on pieces that received the least engagement overall.
The âsuccessfulâ Substacks arenât the ones with perfect SEO or consistent posting schedulesâtheyâre the ones that make readers feel something real. Write like youâre sending a letter to one person who needs your words, not broadcasting to thousands who might be impressed by them.
Your unique intersection is your superpower. That Final Scene exists at the crossroads of film criticism, personal essay, and cultural commentaryâa space only I could occupy exactly as I do. Find the intersection only you can claim.
Cross-posting on other platforms creates ghost subscribers. Half my âaudience growthâ came from people who found screenshots of my work on other platforms. They never subscribed, never opened an email, but faithfully read and shared my work elsewhere. The metrics lie in both directionsâyou have both more and fewer readers than you think.
Growth means nothing if youâre dying to achieve it. Subscriber counts wonât hold your hair back when youâre vomiting from stress at work. Engagement metrics wonât sit with you in emergency rooms or bankruptcy hearings or funeral homes. Build community, not just audience.
In terms of what Iâm doing to get out of this spiral, well, Iâve started to spend more time offline. Funnily enough, walking away from the internet for a bit sounds deceptively simple until youâve built a life there. Some of you may not know that my full time job in working on social media. Untangling yourself from digital existence requires recognition of what constitutes genuine connection versus algorithmic approximation. Friends vanish when you stop appearing in their feedsânot through malice but through the designed forgetting that platforms engineer to prioritize present engagement over sustained relationship. This all comes at the detriment of losing friends, losing readers, not being as on top of things.
One thing that Iâve noticed is that the internet remembers you primarily when it wants something from you. It summons your participation when engagement metrics dip, when someone references your work in service of their argument, or when someone reaches out because they think your platform might generate enough interest for them. Otherwise, it continues without pausing to notice your absence. Stepping away means watching pieces of yourself temporarily go poof, social tendrils retracting without constant nourishment.
Thankfully, being offline gives me weird little gifts I didnât expect. I no longer reach out for my phone while cooking, this phantom limb impulse to document everything. Now I just slice vegetables, sometimes badly, sometimes while wine-drunk. I fold clothes without Huberman telling me I should be doing it better. I watch films without mentally drafting the newsletter before the credits roll (I quite enjoyed the ending of A House of Dynamite btw). Simple shit, really. The relief is so profound itâs almost embarrassing. Like, was I actually that person? Apparently so.
I want to make it clear that Iâm not disappearing!!!! Iâll still be posting, I just want to post when I have something genuinely interesting to say because Iâm excited to say it, not because an arbitrary schedule demands it.
Subsequently, Iâll be pausing monthly subscriptions because I cannot in good conscience take your money when I canât promise regularity.
But before I go quiet for a while, I want to say this:
Thank you for reading my words. Thank you for sharing them. Thank you for the emails and comments that made me feel less alone in my obsessions and anxieties. Youâve given me more than I can adequately express. You all have pushed me, provoked me, comforted me, engaged with me in ways I never expected when I started this newsletter. Youâve shown up to read about everything from Scorsese reaction shots to the cultural implications of DVD commentary tracks. In return, I hope Iâve occasionally helped you see a film differently, consider an alternative viewpoint, or just feel less alone in your thoughts.
The word âhiatusâ comes from the Latin hiare, âto gapeâ or âto yawn.â Itâs about opening up a space. Thatâs what Iâm doing. Opening a space for renewal, for rest, for the slow and silent work of refilling.
When I return, and I will return, I want to give you what you deserve: writing born of wonder rather than obligation.
Until then, Iâll be doing the hardest thing for someone whoâs built an identity around output: learning Learning how to fill my cup rather than emptying it. I hope this doesnât sound selfish, but genuinely, I think itâs the kindest thing I can do for you, my lovely readers.
And if youâre still here when I come back, weâll drink together from a deeper well.
With all my love,
Sophie
Before I go, Iâll leave you with my reactions from the London Film Festivalâfrom films that blew me away to films that baffled me. Consider it a parting gift đ
The cup refills slowly, but it does refill.
Thoughts and prayers from the London Film Festival
BUGONIA
The ancient Greeks believed bees could be born from the rotting flesh of oxenâa mythology Lanthimos weaponizes with sadistic glee in Bugonia. Jesse Plemonsâ conspiracy-addled beekeeper kidnaps pharmaceutical CEO Emma Stone, convinced sheâs an alien from Andromeda here to destroy humanity. What follows is cinematic baptism by fire: my brain cells were torched, reconstituted, then torched again.
Watching Stone, bald, antihistamine-creamed, bound to a basement chair, trade barbed verbal ammunition with Plemons is like witnessing two jazz virtuosos have a psychotic break in perfect harmony. Stoneâs corporate-speak hits with robotic fidelity while Plemonsâ unhinged paranoia feels uncomfortably close to your uncleâs Facebook feed. Just like those parents in Dogtooth who convinced their kids airplanes were toys, Lanthimos shows how both conspiracy forums and corporate boardrooms program people to accept absolute fiction as gospel. The film asks which warped reality wins when neither contains actual truth. Most directors would pick a side. Lanthimos knows better, standing back as competing delusions battle while actual bees die unnoticed around them.
While less visually adventurous than Poor Things, Bugonia might be my favorite Lanthimosâ work to date. This is the most pointy reminder that we live in the wreckage between (at least) two realities, with actual bees dying all around us while we argue about who killed them.
Stray thoughts:
You can tell Lanthimos waited patiently to GO HARD in the final shots
Belongs in the âDid it better than Eddingtonâ genre
SENTIMENTAL VALUE
Watching Trierâs Sentimental Value felt like someone tore a page from my own emotional journal and projected it onto the screenâif my father had been an insufferable filmmaker instead of just garden-variety emotionally unavailable. When Gustav (SkarsgĂ„rd) hands his daughter Nora a script that essentially cannibalizes their fractured relationship for his artistic âcomeback,â I nearly threw my Gailâs scone at some poor unsuspecting festival-goer. What gutted me wasnât the premiseâit was the way Trier captures the exquisite agony of wanting your parent to see you while simultaneously wanting to disappear. Reinsveâs Nora carries grief like itâs a bag sheâs been asked to watch for a strangerâreluctant, annoyed, unable to put it down. When she first reads her fatherâs script (the one that vultures their real-life trauma for his comeback), her face does this thing where you can literally see her remembering every childhood birthday he missed while she calculates exactly how much therapy this new bullshit will cost her.
The house itself, a generational Norwegian home that holds all their collective ghosts, feels like the third lead character, with every creaking floorboard containing some memory neither wants to unpack. SkarsgĂ„rdâs Gustav moves through these rooms like heâs scouting locations rather than revisiting his life, converting his daughterâs childhood pain into screenplay gold without permission. He treats memory like raw material he discovered rather than helped create. The dining room table becomes this perfect battleground where old wounds get served alongside dinner, inherited trauma passed down like grandmotherâs china. Nobody does emotional geography like Trierâhe maps exactly how far two people can sit from each other while technically occupying the same space.
Itâs my favorite film of the year not because itâs flawless (the Elle Fanning Hollywood star subplot occasionally veers into satire) but because itâs so unadulterated about the way we cannibalize our own histories in the name of art, or closure, or whatever weâre calling it these days. Trier suggests cinema canât repair all damage, but it creates a language for wounds that otherwise remain mute. A distinctly Nordic take on healing: pragmatic, unsentimental, quietly wise.
If youâve ever made art out of your own wounds or recognized yourself in someone elseâs creation, this film will slice right through you.
Stray thoughts:
Between this and Hope, Stellan SkarsgÄrd has cornered the market on Nordic men using art to process grief while being emotionally constipated. Somebody get this man whatever the Scandinavian equivalent of an EGOT is.
Also SkarsgĂ„rdâs Gustav casually gifting his teenage grandson copies of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher like theyâre Marvel movies got the biggest laugh at my screening. Men with artistic taste and zero social awareness? I know at least five.
NO OTHER CHOICE
Park Chan-wook brought No Other Choice to London Film Festival fresh off its nine-minute standing ovation at Venice. The film turns layoffs into slasher cinemaâLee Byung-hun plays Man-soo, a paper company manager discarded after 25 years who decides murdering his job competition makes perfect sense. This premise reveals Parkâs true project: showing how our political systems now operate purely in absurdity. When executives can destroy lives with quarterly restructuring plans while speaking in corporate platitudes about regrettable necessities, the only logical response might be equally absurdâmurder as job search strategy.
Man-soo creates actual Excel spreadsheets to track his potential victims, holds performance reviews for his murder plans, and speaks about homicide using the same corporate buzzwords his bosses used to fire him. Blood spatters across pristine white paper mill sheets while the camera glides through it all like weâre watching economic desperation as ballet. I found myself laughing at murder scenes, then immediately questioned what that says about meâand about all of us, sitting in darkened theaters watching capitalismâs logical endpoint play out as entertainment.
Stray thoughts:
Book this with BUGONIA for the perfect 2025 double feature on political absurdism
The way Park uses color in the paper mill murder scenes made me want to screenshot every frame. Pure cinema.
JAY KELLY
Nobody walks the tightrope between magnetic charm and hollow performance quite like George Clooneyâa quality Baumbach weaponizes to magnificent effect. The film mines gold from our complicated relationship with movie stars who age before our eyes yet somehow remain suspended in amber.
Baumbach and I have a relationship status that could only be described as âitâs complicatedâ. His impulse to cram seventeen ideas into one film typically exhausts me, and Jay Kelly doesnât entirely dodge this tendency. Thereâs a forest sequence that yanked me straight out of the movieâs rhythm with its half-baked surrealism (a prime example of Baumbach getting high on his own metaphorical fumes). Yet the film regains its footing through a string of pitch-perfect cameos (Patrick Wilson briefly stealing every molecule of oxygen in his scene) and Clooneyâs electric performance as a man whoâs forgotten where his public persona ends and his actual self begins.
An interesting companion piece to Sentimental Value at the festivalâboth examining fathers who sacrificed their daughtersâ relationships on the altar of fame and creative fulfillmentâthough Joachim Trierâs film ultimately has more substantive things to say. Still, watching Clooney dismantle his own mythology while appearing to maintain it makes for uniquely satisfying cinema. Self-awareness never looked so glamorous or so damning.
Stray thoughts:
Canât believe Iâm typing this, but I didnât actually like Laura Dern in this? Did anyone else notice this or am I alone on Contrarian Island?
Somebody needs to make a supercut of every time Baumbach has a character dramatically walk away from a conversation in this movie â my step count would hit 10k just watching it
IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT
Panahi shot It Was Just An Accident mere months after being released from Evin Prison, and you can feel that raw experience in every frame. The film kicks off with a premise straight from Hitchcockâan auto mechanic kidnaps a man with a prosthetic leg who he believes tortured him in prison. But where Hitchcock would play with our sympathies, Panahi throws us into a moral void. Vahid stuffs this terrified man into his van, then collects former inmates to verify his identity, and suddenly weâre trapped in a moving kangaroo court where everyone acts as judge, jury, and potential executioner.
Its claustrophobic mobile setting becomes the filmâs central stage where moral certainties dissolve. Is this actually the torturer or just someone with a similar disability? Doubt and certainty wage war as their captive maintains his innocence while the group confronts their trauma and thirst for revenge.
Panahiâs career context matters tremendously here. After years of house arrest, travel bans, and imprisonment for âpropaganda against the system,â he understands state oppression intimately. The filmâs strength comes from its refusal to provide easy moral positioningâjust when youâve settled into sympathy with one character, they do something monstrous. By the excruciating final scene, the distinction between captor and captive has collapsed entirely. The central question isnât whether the captive deserves punishment, but whether the victims can break the cycle of violence without becoming what they hate. Iranâs censors couldnât have created a more damning critic than the filmmaker they imprisoned.
Stray thoughts:
Watching former prisoners become potential torturers makes me wonder if healing from trauma is even possible in systems built on institutional violence
The filmâs title could be Iranâs official response to prison torture allegations or the universal excuse of oppressors throughout history
HAMNET
I watched Hamnet on day five of what Iâm now calling my âIll-Advised LFF Cinema Benderâ and even through my festival-addled brain, it reduced me to an ugly-crying mess. Thatâs what Shakespeare does in ChloĂ© Zhaoâs adaptation of Maggie OâFarrellâs novelâhe metabolizes grief into iambic pentameter while his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) actually, you know, grieves their child.
Jessie Buckley gives the type of performance that makes you want to text every actor you know and tell them to quit. She vibrates at a frequency actors spend decades trying to access. Agnes processes grief through rituals, through the natural world, through her gardenâa woman trying to make sense of the senseless while her husband builds a career-making tragedy out of it. Mescal spends most of the film in big theatrical gestures that read more âcommunity theater Hamlet understudyâ than âgreatest playwright in the English language.â I wanted to yell at the screen: âYouâre playing Shakespeare, not someone playing Shakespeare.â But in the final act, when he finally confronts the grief heâs been running from through performance, Mescal earns redemption.
Zhaoâs approach to period films feels so refreshing. She uses natural light to illuminate Tudor homes in ways that make you forget youâre watching a historical piece. She builds a world without the usual heavy-handed signifiers (no belabored shots of Globe Theatre construction or excessive codpiece adjustment). The real marvel of this film, however, is Max Richterâs score. The man knows exactly how to find the emotional pressure points in a scene and press until you break. In the final moments, you could hear a synchronized wave of sniffling across the theater. Pretty sure the woman next to me went through an entire packet of tissues. I wanted to gather everyone afterward for a group hug and a drink.
This isnât a perfect film. It meanders in places, sometimes getting too precious with its imagery. But I havenât stopped thinking about it since. Agnes asks William in one scene if he thinks turning their son into a character will bring him back. We know it wonât, but four hundred years later, in some strange way, it has.
Stray thoughts:
Nothing says 1596 like watching a woman do all the emotional and physical labor while a man builds a career on it
The costume designer who made all the Elizabethan ruffs look progressively tighter as Shakespeare gets more famous deserves a raise
BLUE MOON
Watching Blue Moon during hour fourteen of a festival day means seeing Linklater through the bleary lens of cinema fatigue, which turns out to be the perfect way to absorb a film about a man watching his own cultural relevance slip away. Hawke has somehow transformed into a human bruise, all compressed ego and wounded vanity in that Sardiâs barâhis Hart radiating both self-importance and self-loathing in equal measure. Heâs physically unrecognizable â shorter, balding with a desperate combover, mouth full of bad teeth. This man wrote âMy Funny Valentineâ and âThe Lady is a Trampâ but canât write himself out of his own self-destructive patterns. The film watches him perform for a rotating audience â a sympathetic bartender, a star-struck piano player, his bewildered Yale undergraduate âmuseâ â while the real audience he wants to impress remains upstairs, unreachable at their opening night party. Every time Hart attempts to climb those stairs, you realize heâs already been replaced in the narrative he thought he was central to.
The filmâs single location setup initially feels like someone handed Linklater a stage play, but then you realize heâs trapping us in Hartâs suffocating orbit, forcing us to experience creative rejection in real time. The whole thing also unspools in real time, trapping you in Hartâs desperate monologues as he waits for his ex-partner to show up with his new collaborator. Linklaterâs always been our poet of hangout films and passing timeâfrom Dazed And Confused to the Before trilogyâbut this is different. Itâs time frozen at the exact moment someone realizes theyâve been left behind.
As Hart drunkenly monologues about lyrical craftsmanship while Andrew Scottâs Richard Rodgers has already moved on to his next triumph, I caught myself wondering which relationships in my life are already over while Iâm still writing the next verse. You leave the theater hyperaware of your own creative mortality rate, questioning which collaborators might already be plotting their escape while nodding politely at your sadly desperate pitches.
Stray thoughts:
The only thing more painful than watching Hart self-destruct is realizing your Letterboxd account basically documents the same pattern
Film festivals and Broadway after-parties share the same energy: everyone pretending to care about your work while scanning the room for someone more important
sophie, sending love from across the pond. you owe your readers no explanation, but what youâve built in such a short time is so beautiful and bubbling with the cinematic community at the center â cheers to rest and restoring.
Cheers to you as you rest. Thank you for so thoughtfully sharing your perspective, it's been really inspiring to me as I'm slowly gearing up to share via my own Substack. May I suggest Sing Sing as a direct response for your stray thought "is healing possible in systems built on institutional violence?" Spoiler alert - it's more the people inside of these institutions that can find a way out, in their own way, with their own choices after confronting the very worst of themselves. May your hiatus be exactly what your heart and soul need to thrive.