I agreed to watch it under mild protest. The pitch did nothing for me, the trailer had done less, and the genre is not one I'd normally choose. I said yes because saying no would have required an explanation I couldn't be bothered to give, and because there was a comfortable sofa involved. I expected to half-watch it, scroll my phone, and produce some kind face at the end.
Instead I didn't touch my phone for two hours, and when the credits rolled I sat there for a moment not wanting to break the spell. I've been turning it over in my head for two days. So, in the spirit of being honest about being wrong, here is me being wrong.
why I'd written it off
My objection was lazy and I'll own it. I'd sorted the film into a category in my head, and the category came with a verdict attached before I'd seen a single frame. I do this constantly and I suspect everyone does. You see the poster, you read the one-line description, you slot it next to three other things that looked similar, and you carry forward whatever you felt about those. It's enormously efficient and frequently wrong.
The trailer hadn't helped. Trailers are a strange artform, optimised to sell the film to the largest possible audience, which often means flattening exactly the things that make a particular film special into a shape that looks like everything else. The good bits of this film could not have survived a trailer. They were too quiet, too dependent on what had come before, too much about a look on a face that means nothing out of context. So the trailer sold me the loud average of the film and hid the actual film behind it.
what it actually did
What got me was restraint. The film trusted me. It didn't explain its characters, it showed them and let me work them out. It left silences in and didn't rush to fill them with music telling me how to feel. There's a scene maybe two-thirds through, just two people in a kitchen not quite saying the thing they both know, and it's one of the most tense things I've watched in ages precisely because nothing happens. Nobody raises their voice. The whole drama is in what's withheld.
I notice I respond to this in everything, not just films. The work I admire most, in writing, in code, in anything, tends to be the work that knows what to leave out. A function that does one thing and trusts the caller. A piece of prose that states the point once and stops. A system that resists the urge to handle every imaginable case and instead handles the real ones cleanly. Restraint reads as confidence, and confidence is rare because it's frightening. It means committing to a thing being enough.
There's a particular failure mode this film avoided that I see constantly elsewhere, the urge to explain. Most things over-explain themselves, terrified that you might miss the point, so they say it, then say it again with music, then have a character say it out loud just to be safe. It's the equivalent of a comment that just repeats what the line of code already says. The film trusted that if it showed me the thing clearly enough, once, I'd understand, and it was right. That trust is flattering. It treats you as a competent adult rather than a customer who needs the experience signposted at every turn.
The acting helped, but what I really mean is the directing, the decision about when to hold a shot and when to cut, what to put in frame and what to keep just out of it. There's a long take near the start where nothing is said and the camera simply lingers on someone deciding something, and you watch the decision happen on their face. A lesser film would have cut away, or laid dialogue over it, or scored it heavily to make sure you felt the weight. This one just let me watch a person think. I can count on one hand the films that have trusted me with that.
The film was confident. It decided what it was about and refused to also be six other things in case that widened the audience. The result is narrow and deep rather than broad and shallow, and narrow-and-deep is almost always what I end up loving.
the bit that's actually about me
Here's the uncomfortable part. The reason it landed so hard is probably that it ambushed me. I had no expectations to manage, no hype to live up to or resent, no carefully constructed anticipation for the film to fall short of. I'd written it off, so it had nowhere to go but up. The same film, sold to me hard for six months as the event of the year, might have annoyed me on principle.
That's a slightly depressing thought, because it suggests a lot of my taste is just expectation management in a trench coat. The things I love are partly the things that caught me off guard, and the things I'm lukewarm on are partly the things I was told to love and dutifully resented for being told. I'd like to think I judge things on their merits. The evidence of this week says I judge them at least partly on whether they sneaked up on me.
It's the same reason a tool you stumble on solves your problem better than one you've been told for months will change your life. The hype builds a version of the thing in your head, and the real thing then has to compete with the imaginary one, which is usually more impressive because it doesn't have to actually exist. The film I'd written off had no imaginary version to live up to. It got to just be itself, and being itself turned out to be plenty. Whereas the films I've anticipated hardest have often left me faintly let down, not because they were bad, but because no real thing survives six months of me embellishing it in advance.
So the trick, if there is one, might be to go into more things blind. Skip the trailer. Don't read the reviews until after. Let things be what they are rather than what the marketing decided I should expect, and give them the chance to ambush me the way this one did. Easier said than done in a world built to tell you about things before you've experienced them, but worth a try.
So the lesson I'm taking, beyond "this was a wonderful film", is to distrust my own pre-verdicts a bit more. The category in my head is a shortcut, and shortcuts are fine for deciding which queue to join at the supermarket. For deciding what's worth two hours of attention, the shortcut keeps being wrong, and it keeps being wrong in the direction of things I'd actually love if I'd only shut up and watch.
I'm not going to start saying yes to everything. But I'll say yes to the next thing I've quietly written off, just to keep myself honest. The sofa was comfortable, after all, and being wrong turned out to be the best part of the evening.