I sat down to watch this film entirely out of politeness. Someone whose taste I usually trust had recommended it twice, and I'd nodded both times in the way you do when you have absolutely no intention of following through. The trailer had put me off completely. It looked slow, a bit pleased with itself, the sort of thing people call "quiet" when they mean "nothing happens".
Reader, I was wrong, and I was wrong about ten minutes in, which is the most annoying kind of wrong because you have to sit with it for the remaining two hours.
It is slow. That turned out to be the point rather than a failing. It lets scenes run on past where a tidier film would cut, and in the gap something real keeps happening, a glance held a beat too long, a silence that does more work than any line of dialogue could. By the end I'd stopped checking the time, which is the only review that matters to me these days.
I won't spoil it, partly because the pleasure was in not knowing where it was going, and partly because I'd only describe it badly. I'll just note, mostly to myself, that I do this constantly: decide I won't like a thing from the trailer, the cover, the first paragraph, and then have to eat my words when something gets past my guard. You'd think two decades of being wrong about this would have taught me. It hasn't. But it was a lovely Sunday evening, and I'm glad I was too polite to say no.