I do not trust films that everyone tells me I will love. The recommendation arrives with such confidence, such certainty that this one will get me, that I arrive at the sofa already arguing with it. So when a friend spent the better part of a pub evening insisting I had to watch a particular film, I nodded politely and quietly resolved never to do so.
I watched it on Tuesday. It was raining, I had nothing left in the tank for anything that required thinking, and the remote was closer than my book. Reader, it got me.
the setup I was braced to dislike
I will keep the specifics vague, partly to avoid spoiling it and partly because the plot is almost beside the point. It is a small film. Not many locations, not many characters, very little that you could put on a poster. The kind of thing that gets described as "a meditation on" something, which is usually a warning sign that nothing happens for two hours.
What I expected was earnestness. The sort of film that knows it is being profound and keeps nudging you in the ribs to make sure you have noticed. I have a low tolerance for that. I would rather a thing be quietly good and trust me to keep up than announce its own importance every ten minutes.
What I got instead was restraint. The film simply declines to explain itself. It lets long moments sit. It trusts that you will fill in the gaps, and crucially it gives you enough to fill them in correctly. There is a difference between a film that is vague because it has nothing to say and a film that is spare because it has decided exactly what to leave out. This was the second kind, and I did not realise that until about forty minutes in, by which point I had stopped composing my objections and started actually watching.
why the restraint worked
There is a scene, fairly late, where a character makes a decision. The film does not tell you why. It does not flash back, it does not have anyone deliver a tidy speech explaining the motivation. It just shows you the decision and lets you live with it. And because everything before it had been laid down so carefully, you understand the why completely. You feel it land. Nobody had to spell it out, and the spelling out would have ruined it.
That is a hard thing to pull off. It is much easier to over-explain, to underline, to make sure the audience cannot possibly miss the point. Most films do, because over-explaining is safe and being misunderstood is frightening. This one took the risk and earned it.
I sat through the credits, which I never do, mostly because I did not want to move yet.
the engineering tangent, because of course
I have been thinking about it for a couple of days now, and the bit that stuck is not really about cinema. It is about confidence in what you leave out.
The whole film is an exercise in deciding what the audience does not need to be told. And that is, more or less, the hardest part of every technical thing I have ever built. The interface that does not need a tutorial. The config that has sensible defaults so most people never open it. The error message that says the one useful thing rather than dumping a stack trace and hoping. Restraint is expensive. It requires you to understand the thing so thoroughly that you know precisely what can be removed without breaking it, and then it requires the nerve to actually remove it.
Bad documentation over-explains for the same reason bad films do: it is frightening to trust the reader. So you pad it, you repeat yourself, you add a fourth example of the same idea, you explain the basics to an audience who already knows them. It feels thorough. It is actually noise, and noise buries the one paragraph that matters.
The films and the tools and the docs I genuinely admire all share this quality. They assume I am competent. They tell me what I need and then they stop. They trust me to keep up, and that trust is itself a kind of respect.
I am not going to tell anyone to watch this film. That would be repeating the exact mistake that nearly stopped me watching it. I will just say that I was wrong about it, which I do not enjoy admitting, and that being wrong was the most pleasant part of a wet Tuesday I can remember in a while.
The friend, when I told them, was insufferable about it. Fair enough. They had earned that one.