I went in fully expecting to dislike it. It had the look of the sort of film that wins prizes for being slow and earnest, the kind I usually watch fifteen minutes of before deciding the washing-up is more urgent. Someone whose taste I trust insisted, so I sat down with a coffee and a low opinion and prepared to be vindicated.
I was not vindicated. It got me about twenty minutes in, quietly, without me noticing the exact moment. There was no big speech and no swelling music telling me how to feel. It just kept showing me people behaving like people, making small wrong choices for understandable reasons, and somewhere in there I stopped watching it as a critic and started watching it as someone who'd met these people.
What's stayed with me is how little it tried. So much of what I watch is busy convincing me it's clever, all twists and tidy callbacks. This one trusted me to sit with something and draw my own conclusions, and that restraint turned out to be the whole trick. I thought about it on and off for the next three days, which is more than I can say for plenty of films I enjoyed more in the moment and forgot by breakfast.
I'm not going to name it, partly because half the pleasure was not knowing what I was in for. Mostly the note to myself: the recommendation I'm least keen on is occasionally the one worth taking, and "not my sort of thing" is a verdict I reach far too quickly.