The movie’s concept speaks to The National’s particular attention to the feminine on this album. In a rare move, the singular-sounding Berninger duets with other singers, all women—Gail Ann Dorsey, Mina Tindle, Lisa Hannigan, Sharon Van Etten, Kate Stables, Eve Owen—plus the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Often, just when the listener expects a standard-issue rock climax, the female singers enter a song and guide it to a hymnlike denouement. Or they sing with Berninger, his low growl acting as the sturdy wire in a drape of fine gauze. Or the women lead the song from the start, rendering Berninger’s lyrical ideas as something other than those of a classic sad boy.

The way Berninger’s esoteric phrases repeat across kaleidoscopic tones recalls the modern classical composers that The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner hang out with. The effect is thoroughly beautiful, even if it frequently comes at the cost of The National’s anthemic qualities. The rangy, polyphonic approach fits with the album’s deeper shift, too. Ever self-interrogating, Berninger may lately be wondering whether scraping his own skull eventually yields diminishing returns. Even to a helpless fan of his like me, there’s something parodic and off-putting when, on “Not in Kansas,” his anxiety takes the form of listing artists he’s been digging lately (R.E.M., Hanne Darboven, Roberta Flack). The song’s saved by Dorsey, Hannigan, and Stables intruding to tenderly promise the apocalypse. The story, it’s clear, is bigger than Berninger.

Indeed, the story is often about wondering at someone else’s story: a lover’s, a child’s, a stranger’s. In Mills’s film, Vikander goes through rites of life—school, marriage, illness—as onscreen text notes milestones both tidy (“Learning to read, learning to write”) and abstract (“Aware that her body is separate”). Maybe there’s something softly condescending about this male filmmaker and this male band imagining and marveling at a female experience. But their greater interest is in the genderless arc of life, the epiphanies that everyone shares, and the inevitability of ups and downs.

“Hey Rosey, I think I know just what the feeling is,” goes one of the more hopeful-sounding choruses. It’s one of a few times that Berninger mentions some unnameable thing he aches to have in common with someone else. He gestures to and describes that thing, but never defines it. Over the fluttery kraut-rock of “Oblivions,” there’s this heart-stabbing verse:

It’s the way you say yes when I ask you to marry me

You don’t know what you are doing

Do you think you can carry me over this threshold

Over and over again into oblivion?

It’s the way that you’re gonna stop needing to tell me

You want me as much as I want you to tell me

I’m over the threshold

Everything is gonna be totally okay into oblivion

Oblivion is another word for loss, which beckons constantly in these songs. But the outlook is the same as on Sleep Well Beast, an album putatively about divorce that was co-written (as was I Am Easy To Find) by Carin Besser, the woman Berninger’s happily married to. Fearing endings but also making peace with them, building relationships with the assurance of their deterioration—those are the paradoxes this band constantly turns over. “There’s a million little battles that I’m never gonna win anyway,” Berninger sings on the title track. “I’m still waiting for you every night with ticker tape.” What to call such wearied determination? Wabi-sabi? Sehnsucht? Maybe you don’t need a word, just a sound, and to that end The National has expanded the language.

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