Rabbit hole (2010)

Rabbit hole (dir. John Cameron Mitchell) is a well-made and subdued film about grief and its effect on close relationships. It's a film without frills or big gestures, almost as far as you can get from Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It features some good acting - Nicole Kidman makes a good performance - and generally, the worst kinds of dramatic clichés are averted. The two main characters, a married couple in the suburbs, have lost their small child in a car accident. They do what they can to restore the routines and normalcy of everyday life. The film focuses on the distance between them and their inability to share their grief. They find fault with one another's attempts to be intimate with another and the communication between them constantly misfires (in this way, the film bears some similarities with another great performance by Kidman, Revolutionary Road). Kidman's character nurses a fascination for the boy who run over their child. The couple attend group therapy that the wife constantly questions the value of. The husband grows increasingly impatient with the marriage and finds a sympathetic friend in the therapy group. - - - This set-up may sound terribly formulaic and one can blame the film for not taking any risks, for sticking to the mature-film-about-life-pattern. Nonetheless, some scenes managed to capture the emptiness of the couple's life and the spouses' attempt to find a way out with a sort of emotional rawness.