I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)

Sometimes it’s enough for a movie to be quiet, funny in bits, and nicely made. That sounds like a low bar for praise, but honestly I’ve been watching a lot of Nic Cage movies and this was exactly what I needed as a remedy. 
The movie follows Ruth (Melany Lynskey), a nurse whose house is robbed, causing her to take stock and redirect her life and find a literal partner in crime (Elijah Wood). There are so many times when this movie had the potential to be great. It got so close - there were times when it was really, really good - but then it would just slightly miss, leaving that little bit of wasted potential and me feeling frustrated.
Melanie Lynskey is excellent in the main role. After seeing her in XX, I’m keen to see more of her work in darker films. She and Elijah Wood play really well off of each other, and their strange chemistry really works in a movie with such a distinctively odd atmosphere. It does very much reek of “netflix original” - the cinematography is interesting and the direction is nice, but it's very much within the Netflix Aesthetic. It's got an excess of quirk and style in places where sometimes you'd prefer more substance. In the same vein as other Netflix originals, it has some issues with pacing, particularly towards the end. Tighten it up, Netflix. It would be less jarring if there was more fleshing out done to characters beyond the protagonist. I wish that all of it was as strong as the good bits, you know? That's a pretty generic request, but it's especially important with a movie like this that SHOULD be fantastic!
I Don't Feel At Home does something very important for me, which is refuse to shy away from discussion of mental health. Ruth is in a shitty place, and the reasons aren't always cut and dry, and there's no tiptoeing around depression and its treatment. Little things, through the window of clinical depression, get blown into much larger issues. The beginning of the movie really hit me, because I felt like Ruth was someone I knew or could be in a lot of greyer days. For me, it was worth it for that.
Rating: 7.5/10 - Quietly funny and sadly sweet, but by the end it feels a little like it never quite finished getting off the ground. Doesn’t make it any less of an enjoyable watch, but I wanted the world for it.

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