It’s not often that an indie movie comes along and makes waves, so when they do, they usually make a pretty big splash.
There’s a movie out right now that has a perfect score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s called Sophie Jones, and it tells the story of a young woman dealing with grief.
Sophie is 16 in the movie and she’s simultaneously dealing with the death of her mother and growing up all at the same time. The reviews for the show are overwhelmingly positive.
Take a look at the trailer below.
Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle said the movie is much more genuine than your average teenage fare.
“A movie like this, just by not lying, makes us realize just how often other movies lie to us. It forces our attention by telling the truth,” he said. “It would be nice if there were more movies like this, but few have the talent to make them this well — to take a human-scale story and make it feel, not bigger than life, but as grand scale as life actually is.”
Critic Roger Moore also commented on how true to life the movie felt.
It’s a film of family routines and warm intimacies and somber, silent reveries, with one poignant moment that promises to be a lot bigger than it plays. But Jessica Barr never breaks character in a way that reminds us that for a lot of kids, big emotional responses are something reserved for TV and movie melodrama, not life.
A real teenager might work through something like this afraid of showing tears, channeling her energy into distractions, overcompensation, groping for gratification and affirmation to fill a void. That’s the performance Jessica Barr gives us and the movie Jessi Barr builds around her, a sad coming-of-age story told in muted, almost-jokey tones by a heroine not mature enough to respond any other way.
Director Jessie Barr wrote the movie with her cousin Jessica Barr, who plays the title character. Kate Erbland, the critic for IndieWire, said that the scenes of sadness in the movie really make it special.
Most successful, however, are the sequences in which Sophie overtly engages with her grief — not always easy in films about the subject — and is forced to give voice to everything swirling inside her. One protracted scene sees actress Barr laying bare all the details of her mother’s passing to Kevin, a strong showing of her performance skills in a film that often lets her just float through scenes.
Sophie Jones is currently available in select theaters and also on digital platforms and Video on Demand.