(courtesy IMP Awards)
When my parent died within 3 1/2 years of each other, the grief that enveloped me was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
It felt as if all the old certainties had been swept away and that all the things I knew and could count on were gone, and there’d never be anything to replace them again.
If that sounds over the top and melodramatically apocalyptic, well, then, welcome to grief, a batsh*t crazy journey into irrationality, deep sadness and an almost animalistic sense that you need find some way to make it all mean something.
The new film from Australian director Daniel Reisinger, And Mrs, captures all of the madness and sadness of grief and how it turns your world so upside done and inside out, that you begin to wonder if you’ll figure out how things should go together ever again.
The often funny, many times excoriatingly moving screenplay by Melissa Bubnic, which barely puts a foot wrong with timing or narrative flow, absolutely nails how death’s sudden and manically chaotic intrusion into life doesn’t allow for the sorts of niceties that we typically allow for someone’s passing.
We are supposed to mourn for a set period, funnel much, if not all of the public expression of grief into the funeral and continue to act in all ways like a sane grown-up who’s still capable to sagely and solemnly sorting through the aftereffects of the great hole that’s been ripped in our heart.
But that’s asking an awful lot of someone who’s so off their old life course they don’t even know where home is anymore, and so when family of Gemma (Aisling Bea in a stunningly measured and vulnerably funny performance) try to reason with after she loses her American fiancé Nathan (Colin Hanks) it all, quite understandably falls flat.
Gemma is not in her right mind and no one should expect her to be, but her well-meaning mum and dad, Derek and Lorraine (Peter Egan and Sinead Cusack respectively), and close friends Ruth (Susan Wokoma), and Mo (Omari Douglas) try it anyway and it predictably doesn’t meet Gemma where she’s at.
In one lazy weekend morning, when she was out exercising, leaving Nathan, she supposed, asleep in bed at home, her world is shattered and all her plans for marriage and love evermore are crushed underneath the cruel and unnecessarily vicious foot of fate.
She is lost and sad and bereft and, as you might expect, spends much of the immediate aftermath of Nathan’s passing, staring out into the void while everyone takes care of the practicalities of the funeral and other associated events without her.
At this point, everything is running much as grief is normally allowed to, and if Gemma stuck to the script, she would be allowed to grieve for a little while, and then be expected to behave herself and demurely drift back into normal life (a normal life, by the way, that is no longer there to return to).
But Gemma’s grief is deep and will not be easily quieted by convenient social convention, and so when Nathan’s loopy, out-there and emotionally ill-judged younger sister Audrey (Billie Lourd) arrives, and hears about Gemma’s thoroughly unconventional plans to go ahead with her wedding without Nathan (of course), she encourages her sister-in-law to go ahead with her plans.
Plans that, by the way, are not warmly welcomed by anyone else; at least, not at first.
Making such an unusual plan happen is going to be complicated to say the least, legally and socially, and much of the raw, vibrantly hilarious comedy in the character-rich storyline of And Mrs is drawn from Gemma refusing to accept no for an answer from anyone.
Not from parents, or her friends or even a judge who must rule on if the wedding will have any legal standing, and thanks to some snappy dialogue and a flawless ability to pivot from deep sadness to snappily comedic, And Mrs becomes the story of what one person must do to handle their grief.
Let’s be honest – Gemma isn’t quite thinking straight but you know what? That’s what grief does to you, grief that, by the way doesn’t play nice, doesn’t leave everything neat and tidy and which doesn’t draw back into box like the brief and messy interruption to normal life that its supposed to be.
And Mrs is all about how Gemma figures how to find some accommodation with her grief, such as that is, and how to say goodbye to a man who meant the absolute world to her and whose absence is so seismically disrupting and so terrible that no rational normal response is going to cut it.
While the central conceit of And Mrs is admittedly out there, the emotions and understanding behind it are rock solid, and as you laugh repeatedly through extremely funny dialogue and some brilliantly realised comedic set pieces, you can feel your heart not just nodding in agreement, but embracing how intimately the film gets grief that you feel as if they have reached into your heart and seen every last scarred and sorely sad part of your soul.
And Mrs is an emotionally intimate exploration of grief that is often funny, hilarious and bonkers perfect … and pitch-perfect heartfelt, and it reminds everyone fortunate enough to see it that when we lose someone it feels like the world has ended, and while conventionally mourning for some, it isn’t everyone’s pathway to a life living with grief (it never goes away so don’t ever refer to “after grief”).
Gemma does what she needs to do, unconventional though it is, and as her friends and family eventually rally to her unorthodox way of saying goodbye to the man she loved – quite how that happens won’t be divulged but it’s exactly perfectly judged in every respect – and in so doing makes And Mrs one of the finest films this reviewer has ever seen about grief (and one of the films of 2024), capturing it all with riotously thoughtful humour, an empathetic eye that gets, truly gets, what it feels like and with a sense that you will get this catastrophic pain but perhaps not even remotely in the way you thought you might.
And that is perfectly all right …