I wasn’t going to write about this or “Foe” either, but after thinking about it and reading the Times’s review, I think it deserves a mention. I think it deserved to be a Times “Pick” at the very least. But the reviewer did not like the fact that it wasn’t revealed at the end whether or not the main character did, in fact, kill her husband by pushing him off their balcony. And now I’ve just revealed the ending to anyone reading this.
But at the opening of the movie there is flashed, briefly, a link didshedoit.com and so I knew right away that we weren’t going to get an answer. And whenever a movie or story ends without a resolution, which is sometimes called ambiguity, you have to ask why is the author leaving this unanswered? What does she mean by this? And I think we get told enough, and repeatedly, that sometimes there are no neat answers, it didn’t have to end this way. It’s kind of like being on the receiving end of a lecture from a parent about growing up. And in fact, there is a young boy in the movie (their son) who was in an accident in which he lost most of his vision, who is lectured by an adult on that very fact. Does the author know whether or not the character murdered her husband or that he fell. Yes. I think she definitely does. And the reason is because in one very important and dramatic fight they have, which is only recorded on some sort of voice app on the iphone the husband carries, we see almost the entire fight take place. Then she cuts back to the courtroom and we’re back to only hearing the remainder of the fight and the character’s testimony about what all those sounds were. There was no need to cut away from the filmed fight (and the only time we get to see the husband alive) except for the filmmaker’s need to ram home the notion that things can be hard to understand.
Still it has a lot of skill and the lead actors are superb. I think it deserved better from the Times.