Perhaps there’s a carelessness in reducing a film so diligently layered as Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea to a form so simplistic as “a crying Casey Affleck tells people he's fine, for two hours”, but there's something brutally apt about the description.

Manchester marks the great lament to the agonies of bottled emotion, reaching its critical mass in a scene in which Affleck’s Lee Chandler is confronted by his ex-wife (Michelle Williams), who begs him to talk to her, just to open the channel of communication. He tells her that he's fine. That he doesn't want to talk about it. Repeatedly, over and over again, even though the words become choked and muted by his own tears.

It’s a moment that may hit disturbingly close to home for some: the memory of that deep, irreversible speechlessness that strikes in the face of such incommunicable pain. When words fail, and a new language takes over; one that's so rarely seen on film since its nature is so resolutely anti-cinematic.

Grief isn't always a flurry of passion: tears, broken vases and flowing speech. Spilling out of tongues that already have such deep, intuitive understanding of every fluctuation of loss. But isn't grief also the burden of silence? Slow and aching, sometimes it's the veil of fatigue that descends like a thick fog and makes it near impossible to see the world beyond one’s self.

Grief's great danger is how isolating an emotion it can be, and the destruction it can havoc on our own lines of communication. It's evident even in Manchester's opening scene: Lee is a handyman in a Boston apartment complex, he enters strangers' lives in the guise of a voyeur. With a nod, he traipses into their bathrooms and cranks things into place. He shares only physical space with them, nothing more.

It's a practice he's settled comfortably into now. Though Manchester opens on the death of Lee's brother (Kyle Chandler), this isn’t the first major loss he's suffered in his time. Not the first wounding, but the reopening of an old scar. Lonergan carefully layers in Lee’s flashbacks to his past trauma, flitting back and forth between past and present, as a reminder that those memories have made their presence permanently felt.

Films to get excited about in 2017 Show all 13 1 /13 Films to get excited about in 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 Star Wars: The Last Jedi Director: Rian Johnson Cast: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, and Lupita Nyong'o Plot: No details yet, but it will continue directly on from Rey coming face-to-face with Luke at the end of The Force Awakens. Release Date: 15 December 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 Thor: Ragnarok Director: Taika Waititi Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Tessa Thompson, Jeff Goldblum, Karl Urban, and Mark Ruffalo Plot: Story details are minimal as of now, but Thor's third return to screen has already been teased to feature a loose adaptation of the famous 'Planet Hulk' storyline. Release Date: 27 October 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 You Were Never Really Here Director: Lynne Ramsay Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Alessandro Nivola Plot: A war veteran's attempt to save a young girl from a sex trafficking ring goes horribly wrong. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 Annihilation Director: Alex Garland Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, and Oscar Isaac Plot: A biologist's husband disappears. She thus puts her name forward for an expedition into an environmental disaster zone, but does not quite find what she's expecting. The expedition team is made up of the biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 Wonderstruck (image from Far From Heaven) Director: Todd Haynes Cast: Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, and Amy Hargreaves Plot: The story of a young boy in the Midwest is told simultaneously with a tale about a young girl in New York from fifty years ago as they both seek the same mysterious connection. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 Mother (image of Darren Aronofsky) Director: Darren Aronofsky Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson, and Ed Harris Plot: A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 The Killing of a Sacred Deer (image from The Lobster) Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Cast: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, and Alicia Silverstone Plot: A surgeon forms a familial bond with a sinister teenage boy, with disastrous results. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 Blade Runner 2049 Director: Denis Villeneuve Cast: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright, and Jared Leto Plot: Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what's left of society into chaos. K's discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard, a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years. Release Date: 6 October 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 Lady Bird (image of director Greta Gerwig) Director: Greta Gerwig Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, and Lucas Hedges Plot: The adventures of a young woman living in Northern California for a year. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (image of director Steven Spielberg and star Mark Rylance) Director: Steven Spielberg Cast: Mark Rylance, Oscar Isaac Plot: The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara recounts the story of a young Jewish boy in Bologna, Italy in 1858 who, having been secretly baptized, is forcibly taken from his family to be raised as a Christian. His parents' struggle to free their son becomes part of a larger political battle that pits the Papacy against forces of democracy and Italian unification. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 How to Talk to Girls at Parties Director: John Cameron Mitchell Cast: Elle Fanning, Ruth Wilson, and Nicole Kidman Plot: An alien touring the galaxy breaks away from her group and meets two young inhabitants of the most dangerous place in the universe: the London suburb of Croydon. Release Date: Unknown Films to get excited about in 2017 The Dark Tower Director: Nikolaj Arcel Cast: Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, and Tom Taylor Plot: Gunslinger Roland Deschain roams an Old West-like landscape in search of the dark tower, in the hopes that reaching it will preserve his dying world. Release Date: 28 July 2017 Films to get excited about in 2017 Suburbicon Director: George Clooney Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Josh Brolin, and Oscar Isaac Plot: A crime mystery set in the quiet family town of Suburbicon during the 1950s, where the best and worst of humanity is hilariously reflected through the deeds of seemingly ordinary people. When a home invasion turns deadly, a picture-perfect family turns to blackmail, revenge and betrayal. Release Date: 24 November



Manchester's outlook may be pessimistic, but there's truth in the sense that we carry our grief like old scars; weighted burdens that marks us, that forever threaten to be violently torn open again. Yet, still we persist. And that grief is carried and sustained because its existence is also so reluctantly natural; indeed, the realism of Manchester's depiction of loss is particularly striking in just how unexceptional the whole process can feel like at times.

The cataclysmic force of grief must give way to the ordinary: you can cry and scream and feel utterly beyond hope, but still someone – at some point – needs to get up and go to the hospital to collect the deceased's belongings, fill in the paperwork, organise the minutiae of their funeral, pick up and drop off relatives at the airport. It's in Manchester's quietest moments that its greatest impact can be felt, like when Lee opens up the refrigerator door and realises there's no food left in the house. The world can feel like its ending, but someone still needs to do the shopping.

That strange process, however, can feel unfathomable to some, particularly those young enough not to have been fully initiated into the strange banality of adulthood. Patrick (Lucas Hedges) wants no part of it, certainly; to him, his path to functionality is through distraction, by almost pretending the death of his father never happened. Instead, he indulges himself fully in his circle of friends and the careful trickery of maintaining relationships with two girls at once.

Death is final, so there shouldn't be anything further to experience after the initial loss; yet, Patrick slowly becomes overwhelmed by these creeping feelings of discomfort upon hearing that his father can't be buried until spring when the ground has thawed, meaning the body will be kept refrigerated in the morgue until then.

Manchester By The Sea - Trailer

Lee and Patrick, his nephew now placed under his guardianship, find their paths of grieving increasingly divergent; nor do they have the capability of expression to bridge that gulf between them. As men, their silent mourning exists in a culture which actively seeks to suppress their emotions; to only further cut the ties of communication between them.

If there is a society-accepted language to be spoken man to man, it's that of violence. Lee is particularly culpable here, experiencing multiple violent outbursts at the local bar; though it's only through these actions that he can outwardly express his unsettled pain – I am lost. So lost. And I fear I will never be found.

The fact that rage has become the more acceptable vocabulary for wounded men is perhaps one of the great tragedies at the core of Manchester's suppressed emotions; Lee and Patrick repeatedly snap at each other from across their great divide like frothing hounds, arguing over who's going to take care of the latter's recently inherited boat.

All while that silent language of grief hangs above them, unspoken underneath the forces of easier emotions; if only they could just speak those simple words, “Yes. I miss him, too.”