Who's Counting?

The scouts

The subversive move here isn't the subject—it's the refusal to look away from bureaucratic cruelty as intimate tragedy, which most filmmakers would soften into uplift. Lankester trusts the premise to do the provocation without winking, and that restraint is genuinely unsettling.

A formally precise meditation on loss that locates itself firmly in the lineage of cinema's long conversation with grief and bodily autonomy; the editing's rhythmic patience and the cinematography's studied distance from the couple create a work that will generate real argument about how form carries meaning.

The specific choice—counting itself as the organizing principle, letting numbers accumulate with each scene as the only measure of legitimacy the system offers—transforms what could be didactic into something structurally devastating, and Lankester never oversells it.