The Grief is Never-Ending but so is the Love: Loss and Grief in Cinema
CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of suicide and family loss
“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?”
- Franz Kafka
I have always been a proponent of the therapeutic, divinely comforting nature of films – how they reach out to you from the screen, inviting you into their little worlds, allowing you to recognize glimpses of your own life played out before you in grandiose technicolor. I’ll be your mirror, softly sings Nico, but sometimes this cinematic mirror feels too personalized, enveloping and engrossing you in it.
In 2022, I lost my younger brother to suicide. Naturally, it was very difficult for me to process his absence; I missed him terribly, coming in waves of seeing all the small things of the world that reminded me of him – Haruki Murakami, the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, sky blue wallpapers, 1950s love songs. Sometimes, the grief became so intense, I did not know what to do with it.
I turned to movies.
1 – Aftersun (2022) dir. Charlotte Wells
Director Charlotte Wells, describing her feature debut as something “emotionally biographical,” delivers an incredibly poignant portrayal of how important little memories are – how we grasp for those small moments when we lose the ones we love. Wells lost her father when she was 16 years old; the majority of Aftersun focuses on an extended flashback of one golden summer between 11-year-old Sophie and her father Calum at a Turkish resort, as present Sophie ruminates over the presumed suicide of her father. Digitized memories are powerful, cruel things – the interspersed Camcorder recollections of Sophie and Calum throughout the movie, reminiscing of an idealistic yet secretly suffering father, the once steel-strong memories fading away like sand between fingers. One scene that still haunts me was Sophie recounting how she feels at the end of a busy day, her bones tiring and that lingering feeling of unexplainable dread, and Calum, theorizing his depression has been passed on to his child, spits into the mirror, disgusted by his inadequacies as a father and individual.
We hold onto our memories as if our own lives depend on it, but only when staring death in the face; usually, we are so fickle with them. Lemony Snicket once wrote that the death of a loved one is like walking up the stairs surrounded by darkness to your bedroom, faltering after thinking there is one more step than reality, with that falter becoming a nauseating moment of dark surprise. The feeling never truly goes away, yet the things once possessed by the deceased enter into a realm of perfection, which naturally must be protected; we want to protect what is left of them. Human love is beautiful in this way. This movie does not leave you with an ending — Sophie is left thinking of that perfect summer vacation, that youthful ignorance in happiness found only in childhood. There is no ending to grief or to familial loss.
2 – The Tree of Life (2011) dir. Terrence Malick
“We run before the wind, we think that it will carry us forever. It will not. We vanish as a cloud, we wither as the autumn grass. And like a tree, are rooted up.”
I truly feel like I am unable to write about this movie and do it justice. So, I’ll keep it short. With its focus on So Much – the crushing weight of nature, the universe, our loved ones and their deaths, etc., etc. – some people might find this movie too saccharine. For me, this is the perfect, religious experience of a movie; anything and everything a movie can and should be, a deeply touching portrayal of the inevitable human suffering that occurs during our lives.
Following the journey of the eldest son Jack who grows up attempting to reconcile the death of his brother, who passes away at nineteen, and his relationship with his temperamental, strict, unavailable father, this film ultimately delivers hope as salvation. Similar to Aftersun, we are never told how Jack’s brother R.L. dies, although many people believe he died fighting in the Vietnam War given the time period of the film. There are others that draw parallels to Terrence Malick’s own experience with loss, as his younger brother had committed suicide in 1968. As the film ends with an ethereal, dream-like, prolonged montage of his family walking along a beach shore, we see Jack reunite with his lost brother. With death and suffering, so there is life and beauty – “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.” As an adult, we see Jack wrestling with which dominant truth should overpower his life – is everything so contaminated by sorrow and sadness, or is there something gentler, softer, kinder?
Other movies that have helped me:
The Boy and the Heron (2023) dir. Hayao Miyazaki – My favorite Miyazaki film, and one of the most haunting. As 12-year-old Mahito struggles to adjust to his new life and home after the death of his mother, a talking heron informs him she is still alive in a different world. Very weird and unpredictable.
The Iron Claw (2023) dir. Sean Durkin – “I guess it’s because I used to be a brother. And now I’m not a brother anymore.” An ambitious and heartbreaking biopic-tragedy focusing on the rise and fall of the wrestling Von Erich siblings Kevin, David, Kerry, and Mike, with the final scene being Kevin crying as he watches his young sons at play, reminded of his brothers who had passed away by various causes. In real life, three had committed suicide, another died from enteritis, and another by drowning, and Director Sean Durkin had omitted one of the brothers due to feeling like the reality of the family was too tragic. An incredibly difficult watch.
The Tree and the Cat (1983) dir. Evgeniy Sivokon – An animated short film by Ukrainian director Evgeniy Sivokon on what it means to love and lose something, told through the story of a lone tree and a lively cat. A cat arrives one day and stays throughout the changing seasons to learn the ways of the solitary tree, who states he is comfortably alone, independent, and not grieving anyone. After a period of time, the cat leaves, with the tree then asking the cat to stay – “Because if not for the cat, the tree would not have had a story to tell.”