Everything in Between
Physicists tell us the world is mostly empty. What we perceive of as solid and real are in fact motes of being separated by vast distances between which the entirety of reality can pass without notice. And yet those burning singularities invariably become entangled, creating matter and form and the presence of a physical world. We're a compact of contrasts, both solid and empty, real and illusory. Nadi Sha's Everything in Between is a similar study -- sentimental but philosophical, thinly sketched but deeply complex, narrowly focused but uniquely universal.
It would be easy to think there's not much else to say about middle class ennui; it's been focus of western literature since the middle class evolved and of independent film since at least the 70s. David Knight (Jordan Dulieu) could be an escapee from any one of them, an introverted and lonely scion of comfortable but oblivious parents (Gigi Edgley and Martin Crewes) feeling isolated from the world around him, adrift in that infinite void between us. When an aborted suicide attempt lands him in the hospital he finds himself sharing space with the unmoored, untroubled Elizabeth (Freyja Benjamin) who takes life as it comes until she starts suffering from the symptoms of a strange disease.
On the outside Everything in Between sits too comfortably in the orbit of other, similar films that trod this similar ground. David, his primary needs covered his entire life and his parents oblivious to his need for purpose and inability to self-create it, and Elizabeth, a free spirit with a general, genial spirituality and little use or experience with the practicality of life, are primary constructs of the genre. Sometimes the bonding element is tragedy, sometimes it is comedy, sometimes it is the purely mundane. Everything in Between camouflage itself in those tropes before throwing its nighted colors off to expand its focus and try something new.
As Elizabeth's disease expands, David brings her home (she has nowhere else to) and into the path of his parents who are still dealing with the trauma of being pulled from their personal concerns, the opportunity for easy bathos expands but writer-director Sha easily squashes it. Instead, forced into close proximity and the gap between them diminished, what could have been flimsy sketches of characters expand to reveal inner lives. Elizabeth ignores the easy cloak of the manic pixie dream girl to reveal a frightened woman facing mortality at a young age and in no mood to become someone's fixation. Martin, a self-involved financier who hoped to brush off his son's suicide attempt finds himself offering up the support David has needed without entirely realizing it, while mother Meredith bristles at someone else taking over a role of importance in David's life and slowly realizes where she herself has pushed him away. As philosophical think piece on existence, Everything trends towards empty pop psychology but as interpersonal character drama it soars. The worse things get, the better Everything becomes.
It's a study in contrasts all the way down; waifer thin characters but deep and affecting performances (particularly from Benjamin and Dulieu), light thematic depth but complex family dynamics, straightforward scripting but confident and assured direction. Rather than getting lost within the great forest of independent bourgeois critique, Everything in Between stands on its own like a lighthouse saying something more, and better, about modern life.
Starring Jordan Dulieu, Freyja Benjamin, Martin Crewes and Gigi Edgley. Directed by Nadi Sha.