Grief: A Shared and Isolating Emotion
Grief is a strange aspect of the human experience.
It is at once a universal, shared experience we all will endure, and yet, one that drives us apart. Isolating us when we need people the most. It is expressed as sadness and sorrow, but also anger, frustration, confusion and coldness. The truth is, no matter how universal the experience – we will all lose someone before we are ready to let them go – no one will experience their grief in exactly the same way as someone else. Or at least, that is how it seems.
How can someone else know what it is like to lose your spouse; your family member? The experience of loving them and living with them was yours. Positive or negative, the experience of that specific relationship is unique to you and your interpretation of it. When the time comes to grieve, how that looks is anyone’s guess.
I’ve gathered examples from two films to help explore the way we experience grief and how our grief affects those around us. You may realize by now that the two films I chose are from the horror genre and therefore, you may be thinking “Hey, aren’t these the movies that show what causes grief, not how people deal with it?”. Typically, these movies end at the point the grief would start to kick in, focusing instead on the trauma or events that led to someone passing away.
I’ve selected two that address grief head-on and do so in starkly different ways: one, a scene lasting less than 30 seconds. The other centres the entire story around grief.
Irrationality & Impulse - The Night House
When we lose someone we are close to, rational thoughts and behaviours go out the window. We participate in collective rituals that force us to play the part of ‘someone who is grieving’ but truthfully, they are intended to keep us getting out of bed each morning. It is when we are alone that our irrational and impulsive actions take hold. We sit in the closet, surrounded by their things, wearing their clothes because they still hold their scent. We refuse to put away their toiletries in the bathroom, pretending it is still a shared space. Sometimes it manifests in larger ways, such as embarking on a renovation project or booking a spur-of-the-moment trip.
In The Night House, I saw a moment of grief so perfectly captured that I actually made some bizarre vocalization when it happened. I was at home, watching the film alone and uncontrollably half-gasped/half-laughed in recognition. At the start of the film, Beth, in a knockout performance by Rebecca Hall, returns home from the funeral of her husband. While the ceremony brings closure to their friends and coworkers, it brings nothing but emptiness for our protagonist.
Beth, taking refuge in her kitchen.
Standing alone in the kitchen, their kitchen. Alone in the house they once shared, now taking on a strange newness, as though she’s never seen it before. As though she is a stranger, afraid or unwilling to venture further than the safety of the kitchen. As is common, she has been gifted a casserole by one of her closest friends.
Beth sets down the casserole dish, leaning wearily against the kitchen island. After only a few seconds, she opens the door to the under-the-counter garbage and sweeps the dish into it. She is angry. She is frustrated. She is defeated at that moment. A few minutes later, as the opening credits roll, Beth is on the couch, half-eaten casserole by her side.
What a perfect embodiment of the impulsivity we feel, the rash action we take in mourning when no one is watching.
She’s angry at the casserole. At what the casserole sitting on her island represents. Removing it from her sight offers her relief. But of course, at some point, she has to eat. And that sealed dish tossed into the garbage is one that although appreciated, she finds no enjoyment in eating. Though not shown onscreen, I picture her breaking down, sobbing on the floor in front of the island. Standing up and carefully extracting the sealed casserole dish from the garbage, emotions darting between regret and anger. With no one there to observe her, no one for her to ‘act normal’ around, we see how grief plays out.
Grief as Scar Tissue - The Haunting of Hill House (2018)
I noted earlier that horror movies tend to focus on the events that lead to grief, with the camera cutting away after the resolution, survival, is achieved. Sometimes, I’d find myself thinking “What happens next?”.
In one of the most powerful, beautiful and realistic depictions of how grief can both twist a person’s innermost thoughts into darkness and radiate outward across a family, like cracks in a windshield, Mike Flanagan‘s interpretation of The Haunting of Hill House examines the lives of those who survive a traumatic event.
Weaving between two timelines, the story of this Hill House centres around the Crain family. Told over 10 episodes, we discover the events leading up to the matriarch’s death, as seen through each character’s childhood perspective in the past. In the present, we see the destructive force that grief morphs into, in the adult lives of the Crain family.
The surviving Crain siblings await their father’s arrival.
Like scar tissue, at once identifying the existence of a wound that healed while creating a new form of pain for the bearer, grief envelops every aspect of their lives.
Estrangement. Addiction. Avoidance.
The adult Crains desperately need each other, yet their anger and hurt repel them. Seeing their own perceived failings reflected back at them. Refusing to bear witness, to listen, to be there, when the youngest sibling, a fraternal twin named Eleanor, needs their support.
When I first watched this series, the storytelling hooked me immediately. Never had I seen such care given to the topics of trauma and grief in a series that still delivers genuine supernatural intrigue. The benefit of a series is we get to see how the same event is experienced, those memories destroyed and rebuilt, as necessitated by each family member. It is when I began rewatching the series, that I fully realized how masterfully it is crafted.
***If you are interested in seeing this series and have not yet done so, pause here – I cannot continue writing without some spoilers.***
So much has been written about episode 6, the turning point in the series, titled Two Storms and for good reason. The 57-minute episode is filmed in five long shots, one of which rolls for an astonishing 17 minutes. It contains some of the finest writing, filmmaking mastery and realistic performances captured for audiences. Personally, I have it right up there with the ending of M*A*S*H, and this isn’t even the series finale. Two Storms captures the awkwardness and heightened emotions of a fractured family, brought together once again in grief.
The remaining family members are gathering on the eve of Eleanor’s funeral. In their actions, I see glimpses from every funeral I’ve attended, and the assemblies before and after. Stories of Eleanor as a child, are told and retold by the family, in an attempt to keep her alive, to keep Nell present. Tears and laughter mingle together in an awkward dance. Frank conversations are spoken regarding funeral rites and the processes that enable us to have an open casket. Food is abundant, though nobody feels like eating. The siblings discuss repetitive behaviours they’ve embraced since learning of Nell’s death. The comfort found in changing every lightbulb in the house, ‘just in case’.
Hugh sees his children as they were.
In a breathtaking shot, their estranged father, Hugh Crain, arrives at the funeral home and takes in the sight of his four remaining children. Only he doesn’t see them as they are.
With a masterful sweeping camera, we see Hugh arrive, filmed over the shoulders of his adult children. But as the camera arcs around the room, we see the children as he does, as kids. As they were in the weeks before their mother, the love of his life, died. It is a fleeting glimpse of the family they once were. As the camera arcs around Hugh once more, we return to Hugh’s perspective, his children, adults once again, reality cruelly forcing out his memories. Another of the long takes that define Two Storms, a moment of such heart, so knowing in what it reveals about a father’s grief, I actually missed this the first time I saw it.
If you’ve experienced grief in a collective setting, you may be familiar with the explosive combination of survivor’s guilt and alcohol that closes people off from those around them.
As the ‘reunion for all the wrong reasons’ continues, each sibling wrestles with their own guilt, as each one avoided taking Eleanor’s call the night she died. Combined with this being the first time in years they have gathered as a family, it doesn’t take long for their walls to go up and their emotions explode as they lash out, fueled by liquid courage - pointing accusations and attention outward.
Inevitably, an evening intended to focus on Nell, on her light and life, devolves into petty grievances, hostility and a further rupturing of family ties. As the siblings depart, the camera remains fixed on the empty funeral parlour containing Eleanor’s casket.
Ignored by her family in her time of need, and now, realizing that even in death she cannot bring her broken family together, a grieving Nell can be heard in voiceover
“I was right here. I was right here the whole time.
None of you could see me.
Nobody could see me.”
I could tell you that I’m immune to this scene by now, that it no longer brings me to tears, but we both know I’d be lying. To hear the quivering of young Nell’s voice echoing back from the past, reverberating across the decades, trying in vain to reach the people she loves most, remains utterly devastating to me.
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