Starring: Paris Peterson, Danielle Keaton, Jacob Nichols
Directed by: Robbie Smith
Everyone has their certain paths of processing grief – some choose to cry it out behind closed doors, while others feel more at ease being surrounded by a strong support system – whichever side of the mourning-fence you’re riding – be assured of one thing: the mind & body need ample time to heal. In Director Robbie Smith’s first filmmaking foray, titled GRIEVE, we see the effects of a crippling loss on one man, and his desperate attempts to rehabilitate a devastated soul.
The film hangs on the shoulders of Sam (Peterson), a man who has just lost a loved one and is not distilling the departure in any healthy fashion, so at the insistence of his mother he retreats to the solitude of her remote home in the woods…anyone see the red flags ALREADY? What begins as a curative stay in the home quickly turns into a strangulating shroud of gloom & doom, almost as if Sam’s overwhelming sadness & despair has taken on a manifested physical form and is cutting him off before he can get past his debilitating, melancholic state.
The film takes on a morose & silently deafening tone, as the audience is left to sit alongside Sam while he attempts to make sense of these instances, all the while trying to contend with his remorse – it’s quite the heavy load, even for a viewer who may have jumped into this one thinking they’d see otherwise. This isn’t a bad film, by any stretch – it’s just extremely weighted down with a disheartening tone and an overall sense of what direction the film will most likely end up in. It’s an exceptionally tangled subject to try and break the door down upon your first go-round when lensing a movie, and now you’ll just have to hope that the audience is willing to invest the time to sift through it.
At the end of it all, I can see people watching GRIEVE only as a one-timer, especially since after I checked it out I had the strong urge to run headlong into oncoming traffic – if you do want to check this out – make sure you have some happy programming lined up after the credits roll.
