45 Years

"4½⭐/5⭐ (Finishes in comments) + 45 YEARS is a penetrating meditation into the theme of time; how people go through it, and how they identify with different parts of themselves that have been lost to it. The director is Andrew Haigh; his movies are small drama pieces, but the characters, stories, and themes are pervasive in everyday life. When I see big, cynical, even dark dramas, I always have a suspicion that these movies are made because they seem to more easily draw audiences into intrigue. It is, however, small stories like this, comprised of intimate moments that take their time letting me soak in the world and the characters in it, that go for something much more direct and simple, and though subtle, almost imperceptibly so, draw me inward to the experiences that all human beings have had in one form or another. They aren't about the solicitous; they transcend into the sacred by focusing on the small things that we tend to overlook. This is an impressionistic look into the lives of a married couple who are approaching their 45th wedding anniversary. When the husband, Geoff, gets a letter informing him that the body of a woman he once loved was found buried in the ice of the Swiss mountains, he is thrown into shock. His wife Kate is surprised at how deeply this affects him, seeing as how he rarely mentioned her through the years. Soon she starts to suspect that he secretly wanted to marry this woman, but after the fatal accident leading to her death he was forced to move on and settle for Kate. We start to understand that a key part of their marriage, and by extension her identity was built on a presumption that she was the love of his life. This all happens as a slow build that leads into one of the most challenging, open-ended finales I have seen. The last shot in particular is small, quiet, but devastating nonetheless."

"This movie is great. "