Manchester by the Sea, directed by Kenneth Lonergan, 2016

Manchester by the Sea, hailed by audiences and critics alike as a modern masterpiece and treatise on grief, tells the story of Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), who returns to his home town of Manchester, Massachusetts, to care for his teenage nephew (Lucas Hedges) after the sudden death of his brother (Kyle Chandler). While back in Manchester, Lee is forced to confront his tragic past: it is gradually revealed in flashback that several years previously he drunkenly neglected to put a fireguard in front of the grate while he went to buy more beers, resulting in the death of his three young children, estrangement from his wife (Michelle Williams), and from his community.

Watching the film, audiences may wonder if the task of mourning is sometimes too great, leaving the subject frozen in time. Lee is trapped fast and ensnared by catastrophic loss. The uncomfortable question of the mourner not wishing to “recover” is raised by the film. To unhitch himself from melancholia and begin the mourning process, Lee must sever his iron-clad, shutting out of the lost object and end his remorseless self-punishment. But any meaningful life would mean a loosening of contact with his children, the ethereal nature of that “contact” notwithstanding.

The film’s surface is one of stillness, with stark dialogue, quiet characters, and hushed settings but, beneath it, grief, parental love, rage, and all-consuming guilt roar. Lee Chandler battles with his past and is overwhelmed by guilt over an irreversible action. The “too-late-ness” of his situation terrorises and consumes him.

Lee’s almost psychopathic self-hatred is manifest in the film’s first montage. In flight from Manchester, Lee has sought exile in Boston where he travels from apartment to apartment, in his job as janitor for a block of flats, fixing various appliances and barely communicating with the residents. Every day he shovels frozen snow from the footpath, throws broken furniture int