This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
antonio’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
In a way, it was like two bereavements. My little girl... and the person I once was.
Almost none of us commit suicide, whereas almost all of us self-destruct.
The first time I saw this film I couldn't breathe.
I'm in a strange place in my life right now. It's alien, and terrifying, and beautiful all at once. I just turned 20, an age I never thought I'd reach. It's somehow both such a big and small age. I've become a new person and I've built a life after having been deprived of one for so long. I've started to make my body my home and I've surrounded myself with good people. And yet, the happiness I thought would come just... hasn't. No, that's not true. It comes, it just never stays. The sadness and the self-destruction persists.
Lately, though, on those very dark nights in my mind, where I wonder if all this is really is worth it, I find myself thinking about Lena and Josie.
I think about how Lena survives. Fundamentally changed and scarred by what she experienced, yes, but alive, having annihilated every last cancerous, destructive part of her old self, the self she was when she first entered The Shimmer. I think about how Josie gives in, letting flowers sprout from her scars, walking into the green and joining the many people before her who let it take them, who choose to become one with The Shimmer. I think about my scars, and I wonder if flowers could ever sprout from them.
I am crushed by the weight of my own self, like Lena was at The Lighthouse. Like Josie, and Anya, and Shepperd, and Ventress, and Kane all where. Crushed by illness and addiction and grief and loss, and changed by it all, too. Mutated, in a sense. Because what is living after trauma if not a mutation of your old self? And mutations can be beautiful.
That is my favorite thing about this film. The way it showcases the beauty in death, in destruction, and in the rebirth that comes after. It makes me want to live. It makes me want to continue, to let life transform and mutate me into something better. This film is my space to mourn, and to grieve for the child I barely got to be, for the teenager who spent his years disassociating from his body. It's my therapy outside of therapy.
And isn't that what the best art is?