Addressing Grief Head-On in Commonplace Grief Drama from Jay Duplass

Comic Adam Cayton-Holland would not wish to neglect his late sister, who died by suicide. He would not wish to neglect the sensation of discovering her physique, nor even the fear of erroneously pondering he may’ve performed one thing extra to save lots of her. He cannot neglect what all of it seems like — the ache, the guilt, the horror — with out additionally forgetting all the reminiscence of her. You possibly can’t be selective about reminiscence, nor about grief.

See You After I See You, his adaptation of his personal memoir, Tragedy Plus Time, goals to seize a wierd, seemingly contradictory notion: how will you take care of grief with out suppressing it? It is a sophisticated query to ponder, and, at its greatest, See You After I See You makes cinematic what has beforehand felt so dry in different movies: a remedy session.

This is not extraordinary remedy, although. It is EMDR (Eye Motion Desensitization and Reprocessing). For the unitiated: EMDR is often used for individuals scuffling with post-traumatic stress dysfunction, a course of whereby the affected person makes use of some sort of alternating mechanism (often hand-held buzzers) whereas recalling an particularly painful reminiscence. The concept is that you simply slowly prepare the mind to file away one thing disturbing that has been stopping you from working healthily in your day by day life. Not erasing a reminiscence, however perhaps lowering its sting.

Cayton-Holland’s on-screen avatar Aaron (Cooper Raiff) takes his time attending to a spot the place he is keen to even step right into a remedy session, not to mention one that’s notoriously as intense and as demanding as this, however, as soon as he does, director Jay Duplass actually superbly places us within the sneakers of somebody present process this course of.

When the movie is not dramatizing his recuperation, See You After I See You is much less fascinating. It is a standard-bearer movie, an actual fastball down the center, which hits all of its assumed itinerant emotional beats proper on the right track, with out ever actually difficult us in any main method. As Aaron, Raiff is underwhelming. He is a very good goofball, however when he is tasked with pained anger or overwhelming unhappiness, all of it feels slightly false.

His ache is palpable as a result of the state of affairs is, not essentially as a result of Raiff is performing all of it that nicely. Aaron’s greatest pal and youthful sister, Leah (Kaitlyn Dever) was a plucky girl, a proficient artist, and each bit Aaron’s equal in wit. In flashbacks and occasional fantasy sequences, their relationship comes throughout as deep and tender, if considerably rote. Little doubt Cayton-Holland and his late sister had a particular bond, however raucous moments at a bar do not essentially talk that.

Aaron’s surviving household all deal with Leah’s loss of life in several methods. His older sister, A-type persona Emily (Lucy Boynton), approaches every little thing within the rule-following, organizational mode that she’s attacked every little thing else. His sentimentalist father, Robert (David Duchovny), desires to maintain a lot of Leah’s stuff, together with her macaroni artwork from childhood. And his mom, Web page (Hope Davis), immerses herself within the native reason for saving the Sage Grouse of Colorado in a transparent try to distance herself from grief’s inevitable toll.

Everyone seems to be avoiding one thing, which turns into tougher when Web page finds a lump in her breast, and the opportunity of much more layered trauma appears inescapable. Watching Web page and Robert’s marriage take a large hit from the lack of their daughter, and subsequent disagreements over the best way to deal with the potential of most cancers is transferring, but it surely’s actually unusual and irritating when the script jumps from pressure to sudden resolution on this and different threads with virtually zero rationalization.

That’s to say: the movie struggles to seek out its correct tempo. Generally, the movie strikes patiently, with delicate look after its characters; at different occasions, it rushes previous moments that you simply’d usually wish to bask in. The on-again, off-again romance between Aaron and hospital nurse Camila (Ariela Barer) is usually a waste; Barer is fascinating, however their dalliance by no means comes throughout as all that actual or plausible. Most confounding of all is that, regardless of its supply materials, a lot of the characterization right here may’ve been beamed in from a thousand different movies.

Nonetheless, a lot of it does hit house. There’s an appreciated weak honesty concerning the movie, and a really clear message that therapeutic trauma can not probably occur with out truly addressing it. The movie’s title is a reference to the ultimate textual content message the household obtained earlier than Leah’s loss of life, but it surely may simply as simply be a brand new message Aaron is making an attempt to ship to himself. “I acknowledge my trauma is there,” the message says, “however I get to determine once I see you.”

See You After I See You screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition.