I am not, by nature, an easy audience. I tend to know within ten minutes whether a film and I are going to get along, and once I've decided we're not, I spend the rest of it composing the review in my head instead of watching. So when I say I went into this one fully expecting to tolerate it and came out having genuinely enjoyed it, that's not a small thing.
It wasn't my choice. It was a someone-else-picked-it evening, the kind where you agree to the thing you'd never have chosen because the alternative is another half hour of nobody choosing anything. The premise sounded thin. The poster told me exactly what sort of film it thought it was. I settled in with the firm intention of being polite about it.
What got me was how little it tried. It wasn't loud. It didn't reach for a twist it hadn't earned, and it trusted me to keep up rather than stopping to explain itself every few minutes. There's a particular pleasure in a thing that's just confident enough to be quiet, that lets a scene breathe and assumes you'll stay with it. Somewhere around the middle I realised I'd stopped writing the review in my head and was just watching, which is the highest compliment I have.
I've been thinking since about why low expectations make for better evenings. Part of it is obvious arithmetic: there's nowhere to fall from the bottom. But I think the real thing is that going in expecting little, I actually paid attention to what was there rather than measuring it against the thing I'd hoped for. The films I most want to love are often the ones I watch least generously, sat there auditing them against an imaginary better version. The ones I expect nothing from get a fair hearing.
I'm being deliberately vague about which film, partly because the surprise was half the point and I'd hate to oversell it into the same disappointment I started with. If I tell you it's wonderful you'll go in expecting wonderful, and then we're back where I started.
So instead: the next time someone else picks, and the premise sounds thin, and you've already half-decided you'll tolerate it, try actually watching. Lower the bar on purpose and pay proper attention. You won't always be rewarded. But every so often you get an evening like this one, where the thing you were braced to endure turns out to be exactly what you wanted, and you didn't even have to choose it.