I went into the weekend with no intention of writing anything down, which is usually when something worth writing down happens. The plan was a quiet Saturday: a long walk, a pot of coffee, and at some point a film that I'd put off for years on the assumption I wouldn't like it. I was wrong about the film, which is the whole post really, but it took me the better part of two hours to find that out and I nearly didn't.
The film in question is one of those slow, deliberate things that people whose taste I trust keep recommending and that I keep dodging. You know the type. Long takes. Not much dialogue. A plot you could summarise on the back of a stamp. I've a low tolerance for being made to wait, in films as in everything else, and the reputation of this one was precisely that it makes you wait, on purpose, as the point. So it sat on the list for years getting quietly skipped every time something with more obvious momentum came along.
What changed was nothing dramatic. It was raining, the walk was off, and I'd run out of the easy stuff. So I put it on with low expectations and a cup of coffee, fully prepared to give it twenty minutes and bail.
the twenty-minute itch
Twenty minutes in, I was exactly as bored as I'd feared. A character had crossed a room slowly. Then they'd looked out of a window for what felt like a geological age. I picked up my phone, which is the death of a film, and started doing the thing where you watch with one eye and scroll with the other and absorb neither.
And then I caught myself doing it, and got annoyed at myself, and put the phone in another room. Not out of virtue. Out of stubbornness. I'd committed to giving the thing a fair go, and watching it through a phone isn't a fair go, it's just letting it lose by default. So I started again from where I'd drifted off, properly this time, both eyes, no second screen.
That second attempt is where it got me. Once I'd stopped fighting the pace and let it set the speed, the slowness stopped being something done to me and became something the film was using. The long takes weren't padding. They were giving me time to actually look at a face and notice it change, time to feel a silence get uncomfortable, time to sit in a room long enough that it started to feel like a place rather than a set. The thing I'd read as the film wasting my time was the film trusting me to pay attention, and I'd spent the first twenty minutes proving I couldn't be trusted.
what it was actually doing
I think the trick of it, if there is one, is that it withholds the thing you expect a film to give you. There's no swelling score telling you how to feel. There's no cut to the reaction shot to make sure you got the emotional beat. It just shows you something and lets it sit, and the meaning accumulates in you rather than being handed over. By the last act, things that would have meant nothing an hour earlier landed hard, because the film had spent an hour earning them. A small gesture near the end undid me completely, and on paper it's nothing, a person doing an ordinary thing. It only worked because of every patient minute that came before it.
That's the part I keep turning over. The payoff was load-bearing on the boredom. If you cut the slow bits to make it "watchable", you'd cut the exact thing that makes the ending work. The patience isn't a flaw to be tolerated on the way to the good bit. The patience is the good bit, you just don't get the receipt until later.
There's an obvious parallel to the day job that I'll gesture at and then leave alone, because nobody needs me to over-extend a metaphor. So much of what I do rewards immediate feedback: the test goes green, the graph drops, the build passes. You do a thing, you get a result, and the loop is tight and satisfying. The work that actually matters most often isn't like that. It's slow, the feedback is delayed by weeks, and you have to trust that the patient, boring, unglamorous part is doing something even when nothing visible is happening yet. I'm bad at that. The film was a small, two-hour reminder that "nothing is happening" and "I'm not being entertained every second" are not the same as "this isn't worth my attention".
the small lesson
I almost robbed myself of the whole thing because the first twenty minutes didn't immediately reward me, and that's a habit worth naming. Not everything announces its value up front. Some things ask you to extend a bit of credit before they pay out, and the modern reflex, mine very much included, is to refuse the credit and reach for something that pays instantly. A phone is a machine for refusing that credit. It's always got something that pays out right now.
So the takeaway from my quiet Saturday is daft and small and I'll keep it anyway: put the phone in the other room. Give the slow thing a real chance, both eyes, no escape hatch. Sometimes it's genuinely not for you and you can say so with a clear conscience, having actually watched it. And sometimes, twenty boring minutes in, you find out you were wrong, and the rest of the evening rearranges itself around a film you'd dodged for years and now can't stop thinking about. Worth the wait. I should remember that more often than I do.