Our Friend Death

Written in January 2021.

This was the first movie I saw alone in a long while (it isn’t precisely date-friendly or ladies’ night material). I just needed to get out of the house and wanted to feel something refreshing. So I hit the theaters and picked the first showing that wasn’t Wonder Woman 1984 because…let’s be real…that would have been the antithesis of “refreshing”. Luckily, chance helped me find what I was looking for.

Unlike so many other dramas that use the pathos of unjust death-by-cancer to move the plot along (My Sister’s Keeper, The Fault in Our Stars, and A Walk to Remember come to mind), Our Friend is real and raw. From the very first frame of the film where we linger on Casey Affleck as Matthew as he plans with his wife, Nicole, played by Dakota Johnson, how to tell their young children of her impending death, we are engaged by the individual burdens interwoven between the shared relationships.

The actors work elegantly as individuals and with one another to do all the heavy lifting required to tell the story. Only thinking back have I realized both the lack of swelling, orchestral music (that, again, other movies use to beg for tears) and the minimalistic, subtle cinematography that allowed the acting to speak for itself…the childish, but all too real thrashing out from Isabella Rice as the oldest child, Molly, that makes you ache to relieve her pain; Nicole claiming her validity as a person even though reality slips her grip; Matthew’s constant life exhaustion before, during, and after the diagnosis. Too many other moments come to mind to point out. Even simply the unspoken vulnerability of Jason Segal as the titular Friend, Dane, when he listens to a voicemail, crying during the first listen and laughing immediately during the next articulates the complex human experience without saying any real words. We may not be willing to open ourselves enough to cry alongside him, but we at least smile a little while he laughs knowing that we too have been at our own kind of low.

As much as I point out the film’s sense of taste when avoiding cheesy, existential lines or spine-chilling music to pull my heartstrings, I did tear up a bit. But it felt deserved. And they played one of my favorite Zeppelin songs (it wasn’t Stairway to Heaven, again, this movie actually relies on its story to carry its weight). Dane and Matthew were letting go before they had to let go; I felt deeply their momentarily clarifying relief amidst the hazy delirium of Nicole actively dying. They accepted being okay with longing for the journey to end, a sort of truce with Death. Where in every other loss-of-life movie you only (maybe) feel sadness at the time of death, you will emote during one of the happiest moments in this film. This difference speaks volumes to me.

Our Friend is not an astonishing, aesthetically tragic, single-tear-falling-gently-on-the-cheek kind of film. But neither is death. It is a grotesque, numbing, drawn-out, day-to-day journey. We endure this during our viewing, bearing and burying with our characters the truths of what it means to die.

Read the equally raw and beautifully written true story the movie was based on.