Coming to Terms
2019 · 17m
Directed by Kait Gallagher
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A young Manhattan woman who keeps blacking out after nightly drinking begins to realize her "few drinks" may be alcoholism, and must face the truth about herself.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a sober indie take on addiction—which sounds like every other millennial malaise film until you realize Gallagher refuses the redemption arc entirely, leaving us stranded in recognition rather than catharsis, and that's genuinely discomfiting.
Gallagher works within the confessional realist tradition of personal documentary-drama, and the film's formal restraint—its willingness to let silence and repetition do the heavy lifting—positions it squarely in a lineage of films about self-reckoning that prizes understatement over exposure.
The genius move is how Gallagher uses the blackouts themselves as an editing principle—those cut-to-black transitions become the film's structural nervous system, making form inseparable from the protagonist's fractured cognition, which transforms what could've been a PSA into something formally precise and genuinely unsettling.