(courtesy IMDb (c) Netflix)
If you have ever struggled to find a way to describe how grief feels in all its complexity and lostness, then you likely should embrace and adopt one pivotal line in Thank You, I’m Sorry (Tack och förlåt) where a character observes something along the lines of “grief is love made homeless”.
It comes at a crucial point when newly-widowed Sara (Sanna Sundqvist) is subsumed in the grief of losing her husband Daniél (Mattias Ramos) – though even that is not what it seems with the movie opening with Sara being told through a closed door, and right before bed, by her husband that he needs time away from their marriage; he dies that night so Sara has very complicated feelings about Daniél’s death – all while trying to care for her lively young son Eliot (Amaël Blomgren Alcaide) and wondering how she’s going to cope with the impending arrival of her daughter who’s only a month away from being born.
In that opening scene where her world implodes, Sara looks initially radiant and supremely at ease with herself, as if all the pieces have fallen into place and that she has in her hands precisely what her parents could not give her – a whole, stable and loving family.
But that feeling is fleeting and after Daniél drops his bombshell, Sara is thrust into a new life that she neither wanted nor expected though as she finally admits later in the film, she knew deep down the writing was on the wall for her marriage.
Still, the fact that it all happens so suddenly means Sara is overwhelmed, and while her mother-in law Helen (Ia Langhammer) steps in with the force of a know-it-all hurricane, her reaction to grief to care for Sara with an almost invasive zeal, you can see she feels, thanks to Sundqvist’s richly visible and exquisitely nuanced performance, that she has no one in her corner she can call her own.
That’s a feeling that likely originated decades earlier when her parents divorced and she was left to live with her mum while her estranged sister Linda (Charlotta Björck), who’s caught in a neglectfully abusive relationship with narcissist boyfriend Jasse (Peshang Rad), went to live her dad (who’s now in aged care dealing with a dementia diagnosis).
Sara saw this as a complete betrayal of a lonely little girl left with a mum who she lived but who was manifestly unable at the time, you get the impression, to properly care for her daughter, and it stoked the fires of grief early, an conflagration of loss that is bolstered still further when Daniél dies and her carefully curated world falls to pieces.
The genius of Thank You, I’m Sorry (Tack och förlåt) is that the grief under examination here is not the standard partner-passes-world-over scenario because Daniél and Sara came together out of convenience and stayed that way out of habit or a subconscious need Sara had not repeat the perceived mistakes of her parents, but more the death of an idea, of a reassuring structure that Sara clung because the trauma-drenched alternative was simply not palatable.
Still, grief is grief is grief, and no matter its genesis or impelling building blocks the fact that it exists and overtakes everything in its path is enough and much of Thank You, I’m Sorry (Tack och förlåt) is how people mired in various forms and stages of grief find a way, slowly, haphazardly and messily out the other side.
The good news is that the film never once pretends it’s all some sort of easy Hollywood-golden-glow road to post-happiness grief and wellbeing.
Hope sneaks in here and there, and you see its flickering and possibility long before Sara does, but for every step forward like the stutteringly slow but inevitable rapprochement with Linda and an accommodation with Helen which cleaves closer to a relationship of equals than what is dysfunctionally starts out as, there are many backwards as Sara’s trauma and pain conspire to keep her trapped in a grief-laden world of decades in the making.
You might not immediately think it but there is a beauty in making your way through grief, a sense of life being shown in all its awful glory, and while so much has, of course, been lost, if you’re paying attention, and it understandably takes Sara a while to do so, there is much to be found too with family in particular often coming to the fore in ways that might never have seen the light of day otherwise.
The emotional centre of the film quickly shifts to the slowly rebuilding relationship between Sara and Linda, with the latter, who is kind, caring and apt to see the best in people, needing that reconnection as much as Sara does, taking the necessary steps in the face of some hesitant and occasionally voluble opposition, and pushing on even when it seems she’s on some sort of fool’s errand.
It’s hard not to love Linda who’s vulnerable and caring in a way that seems to evade Sara but as Thank You, I’m Sorry (Tack och förlåt) progresses, you come to realises that Sara, who’s a loving mum to Elliot, is every bit as ready to love fiercely back if only she can be shown a way out of the labyrinthine morass of her hardened wall of grief.
And really, at the end of the day, that is what powers Thank You, I’m Sorry (Tack och förlåt).
It’s about lost people caught in grief-soaked parts of their past trying to belatedly move past it and forge some sort of better present and future but not finding it easy to do; even so, they keep pressing on, and in its own quiet and understatedly meditative way, Thank You, I’m Sorry (Tack och förlåt) gives them the time to do that as they battle through death, loss, grief and pain and try to see if there’s anything on the other side.
There is, of course, and the payoff is quite groundedly wonderful, emotionally rewarding and heartfelt without being twee, but Thank You, I’m Sorry (Tack och förlåt) mostly concerns itself with the journey and for all its sadness and painful missteps, it’s actually a fairly beautiful journey which is tough to undertake but well worth, not just for where it leads but what is learnt along the way.