"From the start, when I started thinking about it and developing it, I knew I was after something that wasn’t horror. I wanted to tell a different kind of story and that about regret and grief and loss and hope. And that’s how it emerged for me. It was never really a consideration of taking it into more traditional horror territory. But I will say, as I started developing the project further, there were these moments where I thought this…

A witty portrait of a deferred career, marriage, motherhood, and a missing matriarch, Maria Semple’s hit novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette unfolded in epistolary fashion, making a unique challenge for Richard Linklater and co-writers Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr. Finding an engaging tone between tightly-packed eccentricities and a more grounded portrait of mental illness is difficult, but his film's rocky introduction eventually settles into an involving tale of self-discovery and how a woman’s dreams can be sidetracked without those…