I did not want to watch it. The plan for the evening was nothing in particular, and the film got chosen by the entirely scientific process of being the thing already on when neither of us could be bothered to decide. The trailer, months ago, had not landed for me. I had it filed under "fine, probably, for someone else", and I settled in to half-watch it while doing something more important with my phone.
Forty minutes later the phone was face down on the arm of the sofa and I had not noticed putting it there.
I am not going to do the thing where I describe the plot beat by beat, partly because the plot is the least of why it worked. What got me was the quiet confidence of it. It trusted the audience. It let scenes sit a beat longer than a nervous film would, it did not explain its own feelings out loud, and it assumed I was paying attention even when, for the first half hour, I genuinely was not. By the time I started actually watching, it had already done the work of earning it, and it never once cashed that in cheaply.
There is a particular pleasure in being wrong about something low-stakes. I had built a small, lazy opinion out of a trailer and a vague mood, and the film simply walked through it. No argument, no twist designed to make me feel clever for sticking with it, just two hours that were quietly better than I had decided they would be. The credits rolled and I sat there for a moment not reaching for anything, which is about the highest compliment I have to give.
I have noticed I do this more than I would like. I pre-judge, I file things under "not for me", and I am protecting nothing in particular by doing it except the small comfort of not having to reconsider. The cost is invisible, which is exactly why it is easy to keep paying: you never see the good thing you talked yourself out of, because you never gave it the chance to be good at you.
So this is not really a film review, and I have managed to write the whole thing without naming it, which feels right. It is a note to myself, mostly. The next time I have already decided something is going to be tedious before it has had a chance to be anything at all, sit through the first forty minutes anyway. Put the phone down. Occasionally the thing you braced against turns out to be the thing that gets you, and you would not want to miss it just because you arrived in a mood.