Is it possible to recover after the worst imaginable tragedy? Or are there some things that you just can\u2019t get over? These are the themes of this muted British drama about raw grief from actor turned director Joseph Millson. It stars Sarah-Jane Potts as Anne, a woman in her 40s travelling alone in Lanzarote. Dressed head to toe in black, and unsmiling, Anne stands out from the other holidaymakers. And she doesn\u2019t talk; there is a page in the notebook she uses to communicate with the words: \u201cI\u2019m not deaf. I just don\u2019t speak.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the start, it seems obvious that Anne is selectively mute \u2013 she has stopped talking, and there is a terrible reason for this. \u201cThe bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved,\u201d wrote Iris Murdoch. This is true for Anne, whose holiday read is Murdoch\u2019s The Sea, The Sea. In her interactions with other people, she is remote, unengaged, or impatient and irritated. It\u2019s a big ask for an actor to perform in silence, but Potts\u2019s big, brown, intelligent eyes speak volumes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But for a film, it\u2019s not quite enough. There are no flashbacks; instead, the audience gathers crumbs about this terrible thing that happened to Anne \u2013 a photograph in her wallet, a business card. By chance she is thrown together with Bill, a big Irish man sympathetically played by David Ganly. Socially clumsy and good-hearted, Bill is also on holiday, a trip he planned as a treat for the kids after a messy divorce. Where Anne doesn\u2019t talk, Bill can\u2019t stop, and there are awkward, funny moments as he blathers on. It\u2019s an interesting idea but the script struggles to navigate the complexity of Anne\u2019s grief and in the end it doesn\u2019t fully hang together.<\/p>\n
Signs of Life is in UK and Irish cinemas from 5 September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is it possible to recover after the worst imaginable tragedy? Or are there some things that you just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-389343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115129362994756775","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}