The Way It Is
1982 · 24m · Canada
Directed by Beverly Shaffer
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Twelve-year-old Helen Murray still hopes her divorced parents will reunite two years after their split. When her father cancels a visit, a painful confrontation with her mother forces her to confront her grief and begin accepting the new family reality.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a gut-punch about divorce trauma, and Shaffer gives you something quieter and way more unsettling—a kid's magical thinking collapsing in real time, no violins, no redemption bow. It's the kind of unglamorous emotional rigor that makes most scouts uncomfortable, which is exactly why it matters.
Shaffer's restraint here is the work of a filmmaker deeply versed in the grammar of intimate realism; the film trusts in the space between what Helen says and what she feels, situated squarely in that lineage of '70s and '80s humanist documentary-influenced drama that prizes observation over catharsis. Every scene construction—the pacing, the ambient sound, the refusal to over-explain—reads as a considered formal argument about how grief actually unfolds.
The decision to let the confrontation scene play out in one unbroken stretch, Helen's face doing all the negotiating while her mother speaks, turns a potentially melodramatic moment into something almost unbearable—it's that single commitment to durational honesty that makes a modest coming-of-age story feel essential.