Loneliness is the topic of a poetic exploration in Rachel Lambert’s Generally I Suppose About Dying. Premiering in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competitors and tailored from the Oscar-shortlisted live-action wanting the identical identify (which was primarily based on Kevin Armento’s play killers), Lambert’s movie quietly observes the lifetime of Fran (Daisy Ridley), a lady who feels most at house in her daydreams.

Fran is simply too distinctively drawn to be simply an avatar, however the impressions of her solitude are aching reminders of how fashionable life nurtures an unsettling separateness. No time was that extra evident than throughout the starting of the coronavirus pandemic, when quarantine measures revealed the diploma to which many people stay in isolation. Generally I Suppose About Dying, then, is a sleek treatise on how difficult — however liberating — it may be to make connections.

It’s not straightforward for Fran, a single lady who lives in a sleepy Oregon city, to narrate to others. The movie opens with sketches of disconnection, scenes that underscore our protagonist’s spectral existence. At work — a midsize workplace that offers primarily in spreadsheets, funds reviews and conferences that might have been emails — her colleagues chatter round, however hardly ever to, her. Fran, protected by her three-walled cubicle, sits hunched at her pc, tending to notes or imagining all of the methods she might die.

Her visions are darkish, macabre interludes with an eerie sample. In a single scene, Fran stands within the basement of her workplace as a snake circles her ankles. In one other, she lies on the mossy progress of a verdant forest with bugs crawling throughout her opaque pores and skin. Demise is a curious factor for Fran, whose musings Lambert and cinematographer Dustin Lane method with out judgement. The duo embrace a visible language constructed round a poetic consideration to element. Like Stephen Karam’s The People, one other stage-to-screen adaptation, Generally I Suppose About Dying balloons the stakes of the smallest or most mundane interactions by way of pictures that linger.

In Lambert and Lane’s succesful fingers, the workplace (the place a lot of the movie takes place) turns into a terrain of fraught social interactions — an area the place Fran, an trustworthy however deeply introverted particular person, struggles to slot in. Throughout a retirement social gathering for a colleague, Carol (Marcia DeBonis), Fran watches nervously earlier than sidling as much as a desk of treats, grabbing a slice of cake and slinking again to her desk. There are just a few moments the place she, due to proximity, will get roped right into a dialog or two. However the small discuss — in regards to the location of workplace provides, about one’s weekend — that retains the others afloat does nothing to nourish Fran.

Robert (Ramy’s Dave Merheje), the one who replaces Carol, adjustments that for Fran. His rent is introduced throughout a staff assembly with a familiarly awkward introduction, off-color jokes and banal “enjoyable” info. In that sparsely-windowed room, Fran sneaks glances at Robert, whose heat radiates from him. They formally meet within the break room, the place Fran’s intense concentrate on making a Keurig espresso is definitely a silent pep discuss.

Within the quick movie, directed by Stefanie Abel Horowitz (who will get a writing credit score right here), Fran revealed her ideas by way of voiceover. The characteristic does away with that and, as a substitute, has Ridley do the work by way of her efficiency. It’s Ridley’s eyes, which dart nervously or stare deeply, her physique language and her rigorously calibrated tone that gesture towards Fran’s interiority. They sign an individual negotiating a craving for connection and retreating into the protection of her personal thoughts.

Robert helps Fran by initiating most of their interactions. Within the break room, he asks for her identify. Later, he sends her a message over Slack inquiring about the way to get workplace provides. These small gestures finally result in an even bigger ask: Would Fran wish to see a film? The reply: After all. Ridley and Merheje have an unfussy chemistry, which imbues their exchanges with the suitable ranges of awkwardness and trepidation. Robert’s curiosity in Fran manifests as affected person listening and probing inquiries.

It could be too straightforward for Generally I Suppose About Dying to offset a few of its austere meditative high quality by turning Robert and Fran’s relationship into one among condescension and saviorism. Lambert, together with writers Armento, Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, slyly keep away from that destiny by not sketching Fran as a vessel for sympathy. She has company on the subject of Robert, whom she learns to look after but in addition sometimes finds overwhelming. Fran struggles to work together with others not as a result of she’s not attention-grabbing — though she would possibly insist in any other case — however as a result of generally the world values a efficiency of character greater than the particular person.