In DEEP QUIET ROOM a man tries to come to terms with the suicide of his pregnant wife. Devastated at the loss he tries to figure out what drove her to take her life and the life of their unborn daughter.
The film is a documentary like low key look at grief and the things unsaid. Watching the film the first time I was rocked by the film and its expression of grief. The fact that the film is carefully modulated and that there are no explosive expression of grief or rage or pain is somehow deeply disturbing.
When the film ended, I sat staring at the screen pondering what I had just seen and pondering if I wanted to do the scheduled interview for the film since the film exists in such a painful place.
And then I pondered the film again.
And I pondered the film some more… and I started to like the film less.
Yes, the filmmaking creates a definite mood everytime you watch it, but the narrative doesn’t quite work. Indeed, the film kind of cooks the books.
The biggest problem with the film is that the wife is almost entirely a cipher. We only get to see here from the point of view of the husband and what we see is limited. She doesn’t say much beyond hitting certain notes. She does react to things, but it isn’t always clear to why she is reacting as she is because there is too much un said for us to tryuly know her. Of course, it’s hard to understand since we are seeing it from his perspective and he doesn’t know what he doesn't know (or what we as an audience need). The bigger problem is we never quite see why they are together. What attracted them to each other? Why did they fall in love. Why does he care other than she is his wife? The opening sequence of their meeting in a library says almost nothing other than it shows their meeting.
A bigger problem is the film tries to give clues to things that we don’t need to know. For example, and the moment that I realized that something seemed off, is the scene where the husband is given a passage in a book to read. In the scene he is told about how working on the book and that passage in particular triggered repressed memories. The discussion goes on to explain that the wife had tried to commit suicide as a teen and had received a brain injury that not only injured her memory but made it so things could be confused. The exchanged bothered me when I saw the film but the film was so strong it pulled me back in. The trouble is the exchange haunted me after I saw the film and made me re-evaluate the. Something seemed off. It wasn’t so much the earlier suicide attempt or the repressed feelings but the memory loss and confusion. We don’t need to know that. There is something about that, especially coming so late in the film, that bothered the hell out of me. Why is it there? maybe to give him an out, that perhaps the suicide was the result of confusion?
It bothered me so much that I went back and started to watch the film again with an eye toward the construction of the narrative and I was not as in love with the film as I had been. Its not so much that things are not said, which is fine, after all we don’t say everything to our friends who don’t need explanation, rather, I noticed that we were not told about things we should have been told about – like why these two are together. Where the characters and their interactions are mostly fine, there should be clues about details of their life together – like what they saw in each other- I say that because most of what we see are tense moments. We only see things that effect the narrative and nothing that would bleed out as a real moment in life would. Even while we are seeing things from on POV we never see the happy. We never see a random moment only something that ultimately figures into the story. And on the second viewing it is very clear how much of a cipher she is. Watching it play out a second time I realized exactly how cherry picked the moments were.
After the second viewing the disturbing viewing experience was there but it was tempered by realizing how much we were being manipulated. I didn't like it. I was no longer watching life but a kind of polemic.
I went from really liking the film to thinking its just okay.
While the film is a disturbing ride, and it's well acted and well made, I’m not sure if its good or not. I’m leaning toward not so much.
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