Part of me was repeatedly going, "Wow, this is so not how an American movie would work with this scenario!"...another part was getting glum and wishing for a little more sarcasm. But at the end of it all, the story made sense and ended in a way that was faithful to Andriy's character, plausible enough for the more elusive Catherine, philosophical, and even lovely. (If it had come out during the pandemic lockdowns, I'm sure many of us would have…

In his introduction, the director said that the story of the wrong husband was a true one thousands of years old. He'd incorporated the troll and shamans so as to give reasons why these events had occurred. In the post-screening Q&A, he said it was elders in his community who had told him about the troll, which a few of them had seen at a distance… that it had a big nose, and was a sea creature, and thus in…

Splendidly acted: Chloë Sevigny gives a master class in line readings; Lily McInerny leads with aplomb; Claes Bang finds a heedless charm in a character who could otherwise seem calculating; Nailia Harzoune is drily comic. Beautiful costumes (chef's kiss for the dress that turns into its own cape), lovely music, scenic setting. The writing had several closely observed comedy of manners moments (e.g., the wet bathing suit moment, remarks on reading aloud).

What held this back was, (1) I felt…

I feared this would be dreary or sappy. Instead, it turns on a dime from an earned tenderness to bone dry, trenchant humour. The three leads are wonderfully messy and flawed, the three men are taken down with splendid precision, and when the audience laughed, it was in that shock-of-recognition way. I also appreciated that the film took the "beautiful people in aspirational jobs" trope and made the jobs genuinely relevant to the plot -- the ex's and a certain…