Saw The Dead, a film based on the James Joyce short story of the same name (which I know I have read but which I do not remember.) The film depicts a family party hosted by spinster aunts sometime in the early 1900s (I suppose.) Like a visit to grandma's house, the film is fairly slow and tame and quaint, but also touching and strangely poignant too.
The film's most main characters are a husband and wife who are both sensible and pleasant people. They get along well, but there's a foreshadowed undercurrent of tension between them though. The wife is strangely intent when a guest recites a poem about a woman breaking a man's heart, and there's a few scenes where the husband seems oblivious or cold to the wife. What's going on between them is explored more at the end, so I won't spoil it here.
As you might guess from the name, the theme of the film is death and memento mori. The spinster aunts are nearing death and are precious in their fragility. They reminisce over dead singers and there's talk of monks who sleep in their own coffins to keep the certainty of death near by. The closing of the film has a long monologue about the dead and us the living.
The film is very soothing, very stultifying. It's slow and quaint in a kind of BBC Charles Dickens kind of way. It's really like a visit to gandma's. It's not a blast and it's not the most fun you might have, but you feel better for having watched it and you feel lighter as a result. It was a sweet little film.
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