McGowan wisely sets the spine of his film – a series of conversations between Yoli and Elf, where their jokey, sisterly manner belies how desperately urgent both their pleas are – and then builds it out, layering in just the information we need at the moment we need it. Watch her eyes darken when Yoli realizes what Elf means by, “They have clinics in Switzerland.” Watch her face in one perfect funny moment, when some dude from her past equates writing with cleaning septic tanks – in the first nanosecond she’s amused, grossed out and slightly offended in the next, she’s thinking it over, and she agrees. You can practically feel the snow on her cheek. Mongrel MediaĪs for Pill – she’s sensational, one of those rare actors whose skin is near-transparent. Screenwriter and director Michael McGowan turns a story about grief into one of the most life-affirming things you’ll ever see.

On film it only works if everyone is making exactly the same movie – and I mean everyone, from the production designer who knows what someone’s bookshelves should look like to the sound engineer who finds just the right (menacing, innocent) chug of a train. Getting that tone right is how a story about grief turns into one of the most life-affirming things you’ll ever see. Life is funny because it is so sad, beautiful because it is ephemeral. But in the collective scheme of things, they are nothing. Our individual sorrows, when we are suffering them, are everything. What the screenwriter and director Michael McGowan pulls off here is a miracle of tone – the same tone that Miriam Toews established in her source novel, whose title comes from a Coleridge poem: “I too a Sister had…To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows.” It’s that juxtaposition of puny and sorrow, that heightened awareness of the bitter-sweetness of being human, that slays me.

That sounds bleak, but mysteriously, it’s the opposite. Mare Winningham in a scene from All My Puny Sorrows.

All my puny sorrows summary