A common and justified charge towards today’s true crime culture is the humanity of victims and their families taking a back seat to some of the more sensational elements of the story, the gory details and all of that. Often those effected by acts of violence are treated almost like punch lines instead of actual people. Harry Sheriff’s Misper is an exploration in how those close to the victims of violence are changed by it all, and how they cope with what they’re facing.
Leonard has a boring desk job at a floundering seaside hotel. He’s good at it, but there’s not much to manning the front desk and occasionally doing the rounds to make sure the staff is doing their jobs. The bright spot in his day is seeing his coworker Elle, a young woman he hasn’t quite worked up the nerve to ask on a date. One day, Elle goes missing after leaving work and Leonard is forced to come to terms with what could have been and what will never be.
Much of the film treats Elle as something of a human McGuffin, focusing on her coworkers dealing with losing her. We’re treated to shots of them bursting into tears in the hallway or gathering in the breakroom watching news updates on her disappearance or losing their cool on pesky customers. The weight of Elle’s disappearance is felt in every shot of this film, but much of the focus is on those closest to her and not her herself. There’s a fair amount of the usual Hallmark Channel beautifying of the missing or deceased, and while some of that comes off as a bit cliched it feels like Sheriff is only including them to highlight the genuine pain Elle’s friends and family are feeling in the wake of her going missing and to criticize such saccharine tendencies in modern media.
“Grief as trauma” has become something of a hackey term in horror films recently, but Sheriff chooses to focus instead on the dread someone feels when a loved one goes missing. All cards on table there is a goodish amount of time in the film that deals with grief, but most of it is about the waiting. It’s the subtle and horrid difference between grieving someone whose died versus waiting for them to die that Sheriff seems interested in exploring. Despite being rather lowkey, this film is laden with a sizzling anxiety that anyone who’s dealt with losing a loved one after a prolonged illness will immediately relate to. Samuel Blenkin as Leonard shoulders most of the weight in this regard, embodying the stomach roiling fear, the ceaseless nausea of it all, in such a way that it completely immerses the viewer in the story. Every scene he’s in feels like he’s struggling not to throw up or freak out and it’s gorgeous.
Lack of closure is another theme running through the film, the sick what if…? survivors often feel, the unsaid everything’s running through our heads after the chance to say them has forever passed. There’s a rather poignant scene towards the end of the film that highlights this concept perfectly, one that I think brilliantly captures the bittersweetness of accepting the finality of a situation and the pain of starting to move on. Once again, Blenkin nails it with his performance. You can almost see the imagined scenarios where had asked Elle out running through his mind as he drifts through the days following her disappearance.
Despite the dark nature of the narrative, there’s a quiet streak of humor throughout it, a morbid subtlety that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Coen Brothers film, or even an earlier Wes Anderson film. Mostly, it’s the terrible absurdity of these people being expected to go on with their lives as if nothing has happened after losing a friend that’s the source of this dark humor. The straight-faced way that Blenkin plays Leonard as he’s struggling to comprehend the horror of it all reminded me, for some reason, of Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic facing setback after setback and just getting more and more frustrated throughout it all.
I cannot recommend this film enough. Sheriff expertly directs the cast into creating a melancholy tale of loss and regret, but never lets it become bogged down in despair. It’s like a Magnetic Fields song come to life: the pretty girl who left her job and never came back, and the boy that got left behind. It’s a deft examination of survivor’s guilt and the power of solidarity when it comes to struggling with loss, and a subtle but effective critique of a culture obsessed with scandal and violence that has little regard for those who are most destroyed by it all.
