For a film that opens with a woman walking through the snow, it’s perhaps apt that the subjects under scrutiny here are a collection of cold, rather wintry folks. The woman in question, Hannah (Sophie Rois), is a single mother living in a remote Alpine village, whose discover of the body of an elderly woman sets up the narrative of this excellent, slow-burning domestic drama.
Some pretty big names in the mix this week, including a small rush of survivors from the American ‘80s underground: shame the Lemonheads’ covers album hasn’t arrived in time to complete the set.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about dying recently,” says Philip Seymour Hoffman’s neurotic theatre director Caden Cotard early on. And, certainly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the odds were stacked against him. Within the first half hour of Synecdoche, New York, there are enough portents of doom lurking around you’d think you were watching a tragedy, were it all not so funny.
