Ropey
2021 · 12m · UK
Directed by Giles Ripley
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, tender
Reeling from the death of her husband Finn, Heather muddles through grief in therapy until a suicide attempt is interrupted by Finn himself — leaving her, and the audience, to wonder whether he is a ghost, a memory, or a lifeline her mind has summoned.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most films would collapse under the weight of mixing suicide ideation with dark comedy, but Ripley refuses to pick a lane—and that refusal is exactly what makes it work, turning the whole grief-as-narrative thing inside out.
The ambiguity about Finn's ontological status positions itself deliberately against the realist tradition of grief cinema, borrowing instead from a lineage of formally playful interrogations of memory and presence that stretches back through ghost-story and avant-garde practice.
The entire film hinges on the decision to let Finn's materiality remain genuinely unresolved—not coy, not symbolic, but genuinely uncertain—and that structural integrity is what elevates an 11-minute character study into something that actually lands the emotional stakes.
Reviews
Navigates through the darkest feelings while allowing hope and sweetness to be expressed.
A beautiful story about loneliness and its bad effects... the love who has not as border the death.
Festivals
- Encounters Film Festival 2021