Demolition

Demolition (2016) is about a man who loses his wife in a car accident and feels nothing. Davis is told at the hospital that she is dead and does not cry. He tries to buy sweets from a vending machine in the corridor, it swallows his money, and that night he writes a complaint to the company. The letter starts with the sweets, moves to his wife, and runs for pages. Then he writes another. Karen, who works at the vending company, reads them and calls him one night. Meanwhile Davis starts taking things apart: the fridge, his computer, the bathroom door, eventually the whole house. Asked why, his answer is that to understand why something broke you have to dismantle it completely. The idea is that grief does not arrive in the expected form. He is not failing to grieve; he is realising he never knew his wife, and that is what he has actually lost. Jean-Marc Vallée directed, his third after Dallas Buyers Club and Wild. Jake Gyllenhaal stars. The editing is deliberately loose: memories cut in, sound slides, and time does not run evenly. The soundtrack comes out of the character's headphones. The final section is over corrected and is the weakest thing in it. It runs 101 minutes. Good for: films about grief, character drama, and quiet storytelling. Less good for: the conflict is low, the lead stays at a distance, and the ending closes too easily.