(Major spoiler warning for Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2025 release The Woman In The Yard)
“It’s tough, you know, being a person.”
(Fran, Sometimes I Think About Dying)
I’ve been working through Lois Daniel’s book, How To Write Your Own Life Story: The Classic Guide for the Nonprofessional Writer in 2025. I had just finished writing a segment on a time in my life when I was wrestling with thoughts of suicide.
Which is not to say those thoughts ever go away. I think anyone who understands this space understands it is a tension we learn to live with. In Rachel Lambert’s 2024 film Sometimes I Think About Dying, she astutely captures and comments on the art of feeling trapped inside one’s own mind. The way she shoots the film allows her to reposition us within different vantage points, sometimes seeing from the main character’s POV (Fran, who is wrestling with the stuff of life and the idea of death), while other times seeing from the outside looking in at her, be it from the POV of the cast of characters that surround her or the camera itself.
While Sometimes I Think About Dying is more about the anxiety and depression that is sometimes running underneath thoughts of death, the recent release of Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2025 film The Woman in the Window dives head first into the subject of suicide itself. Interestingly, this is a film that is also very much about POV, however in this case it focuses on the contrasting perspectives at war inside our main character’s own mind as she wrestles with the world and its tensions,
It’s a messy film, to be sure. So much hinges on the film’s ending reshaping our understanding of the journey, which leaves the journey itself, at least in the moment, feeling disparte and disjointed. It is however the reshaping that has stuck with me, leading me to consider its perspective over and against my own.
To touch on my own story: I grew up in a prototypical evangelical Christian home. On the surface I played out the equally prototypical story of young kid adopting the faith of their parents, only to question it down the road. However, as it is with any prototypical story, dig underneath the surface and one will find the necessary nuance needed to understand that every story is in fact offering its own vantage point on the same shared reality. Part of the process of writing my life story is doing precisely that.
What I have uncovered is a thread, stemming from my childhood, as young as 5 years old if I stick with my active memories, of someone who, for whatever reason, felt drawn to the bigger questions of life. As soon as I gained the ability to look at life and say something about it, I felt this inate need to understand it.
And the more I sought to understand it, the more atune I became to its tensions. In many ways this manifested as fear. Not fear of death. At least that’s not what my story seems to be suggesting. But fear that I will fail to understand this world rightly, and the deep rooted anxiety that seeks some level of integrity between what I believe to be true and how I actually live. And perhaps more profoundly, this would translate into a deep rooted fear of being misunderstood. There is nothing more powerful in this world than the thought and realization that you are what the world, what others, say you are. This is what has ultimate power over your story in the end. Thus, it is far more necessary to ensure that this world, those others, understand how and what you see, as that’s the only way to locate your perspective in tangible relationship to and conversation with the world, or with a reality that is true.
This would follow me through the different phrases of my life. As a introverted kid, or what I would come to call in my adult years, an introverted extrovert (big gatherings or crowds lead to immense anxiety, however I also find that I do not do well being alone), I tried to stay on the boundaries of the whole church world thing. It was part of my family routine, but I was content to live it out in the context of my own carved out space, much of that devoted to my early love of reading. Books were my way of doing Church.
I did eventually find my way into the whole physical church circle thing when I was 16, somewhat ironically through what was at the time one of the biggest youth groups in Winnipeg. Here I had to figure out how to carve out space in that social setting that could allow me to co-exist as my introverted self, something I managed to do by sticking to the fringes. This entry point would go on to shape the next 15 years of my life, including a church split that spawned a house church, which grew into what would now be considered a mega-church, and my eventual departure from this community. In that time my story travelled a similar path- one foot in the middle of the tradition, another foot anchored in the fringes. It is here where that childhood tendency to constantly wrestle with the questions and the tensions was held afloat. And while I had become adept at holding this in balance, a series of life events and transformations in the church world itself eventually led me to a place where I ultimately decided to leave the whole faith in God thing behind (fast track to a different part of my story: I eventually returned to faith, albeit one that had a different shape and context).
There I was. Floundering in this new space, trying to figure out how to proceed in a world where I was losing all of the defining markers of my life. Where do I go? What do I believe? How do I establish new relationships within the framework of a new worldview, using a different paradigm to seek after that stubborn and persistant need for integrity?
However I moved forward, it needed to match up with what I believed to be true about this world and about myself. Thus I set out in efforts to figure this out. As I did so I digged deeper into the atheist circles and forums that were available to me.
This went on for a while until I started to notice some cracks in these spaces. Having come from what I would call fundamentalist Christian roots, I was beginning to notice more and more some similar fundamentalist notes in the brand of atheism I had adopted. Famously called the “new atheists”, it was led by a primary collective of thinkers and scientists and academics leading the way into this brave new world of anti-religious secularism. The power of that old paradigm, built on an over allegiance to facts, certainty and apologetics, came crashing back in, simply with its new secularist mantra in tow.
The first time I noticed this was when I started to find in my atheist circles a deep resistance to some of the challenges I was posing to some commonly held beliefs. I had thought this new community was supposed to be open to the questioning. And yet I was finding more of the same- appeals to illusion over truth, a refusal to examine the tightly guarded beliefs that hold our certain convinctions intact, a heavy set commitment to indoctrination. I knew all of this only too well.
Thus, the more I pressed this community, the more I found myself once again alone. Not retreating back to God. Just alone in my questions and my pursuit of integrity. The one thing that made sense to me at this time in terms of a worldview was materialism, and yet the implications of materialism appeared to be the thing the vast majority of humans most resisted. It was that tension that fascinated me. Or maybe that tormented me.
Things eventually came to a climax, or a focal point. for me over this one, single question that I kept returning to over and over again- is there a good reason why I shouldn’t commit suicide. Not that I was necessarily suicidal at the time. Rather it was part of the logical process I was appealing to in order to make sense of this world, my life. Here’s what I knew ,
- Life has far more suffering than good. Suffering far outweighs any experience of the good
- The simple act of living/existing does far more harm than good regardless of intent
Thus its extremely difficult to make a logical case for why I shouldn’t commit suicide on either beneifical grounds or on moral grounds. Thus the only way to answer the question with an appeal to the positive is to appeal to something illogical or irrational when weighed against a materialist POV. What I found is that this most often emerges in approaches that seek to romanticize the suffering. And yet, where materialism is concerned, its all based on an illusion. Everything in this view of reality is an emergent property, and yet at the same time it is necessarily deconstructed into the same basic properties- it is all construction that can be reduced to the simple truth that meaning doesn’t truly exist. It is manufactured. Thus, any view that attempts to build a case for life, for living, is necessarily bound to the expectations of privilge and success. It is not true that I have any inherent worth and value, it can only be true that worth and value are afforded based on grounds that do not have a logical or consistent foundation. Worse yet, its logically impossible for me to say that my choices, my actions, my investments actually make this world better, actually make someone elses life better. It’s equally possible that my presence, my choices, my actions, my investments make someones life worse, make the world worse, if its even possible to measure such a thing in the first place. In fact, this is most likely to be the case in a materialist POV. Thus the only justification is to be able to say, in light of that fact I still find this investment/choice/action to be valuable in the moment. in and of itself. Which is appealing to an illusion, not something true.
And then there is the additional defining point- if this was true, it undercut any moral grounds for answering the question with an appeal to integrity. Morality would, and could, be shaped by an appeal to the greater good. To this end I can logically argue that my existence is not only negligible and expendable, but wrong.
So if there was no good answer as to why I shouldn’t commit suicide, what prevents me from doing it? Why do I not do it?
This is the question I found sitting at the heart of The Woman in the Yard.
Here I think i need to delve deeper into why that is in order to truly capture, from my perspective, what this film is doing (spoiler warning again).
First off, I think it’s wrong to interpret this film as a metaphor for grief. That might be part of the picture, but its not the point of the story.
This is a metaphor for suicide.
Why is that important? It is important because, if you aren’t someone who has wrestled with thoughts of suicide on a personal level, reducing it to grief becomes a way of categorizing the struggle in terms of shame or guilt or regret or failure. Or the bigger label- crazy. In fact, one of the biggest and most relevant threads in this film reflects the complete opposite- one of the great struggles of suicidal thoughts and tendencies is that it is in fact seeking to be logical and rational as a conceit.
Again, my opinion, but if we miss suicide as the central point of the metaphor, we miss what it wants to say about the subject. We end up reducing thoughts òf suicide to a wrong headed response to circumstance, which of course misplaces it as delusion or craziness. The tragic outcome of someone thinking wrongly.
Just to underscore this, note the way the film depicts the memory of the tragic car accident that took the life of the main characters husband. Throughout the dinner scene she is depicted as someone who is wrestling with the incongruities and cognitive dissonance that life tends to create. We then get the resulting image of the car crash, now with her behind the wheel, being rooted in the image of this woman in the mirror before driving head on into an oncoming vehicle.
Which means it is a suicide attempt.
When we arrive at this family absent now of a father, the injured and recovering mother spends her days praying for strength. The reveal is, not strength to face her grief, but strength to take her life. But here is the thing. I do not think this is depicted as a desire born out of remorse or guilt or shame or delusion. Rather, it is born out of what she deems to be the logical conclusion of her existence. Just as her existence harms her husband, her existence threatens to harm her children (hence the dualing images of over protection and outright harm, something she responds to by employing intentional distance).
As someone who has wrestled with suicidal tendencies and struggles, I can say this is one of its most potent expressions and commitments. Suicide is, at its heart, a question of logic and reason, as in, it seeks for a logical reason not to take ones life. And one of the deepest and most difficult aspects of wrestling with this logic is that it often comes back with an answer that says, there isn’t one. For every moment that says, I need to live for this, that same moment can be undercut by the very real reality that my living for this thing will most likely result in more harm than good. And no matter how much one tries to find reasons that suggest otherwise, reality keeps betraying these attempts to justify living as illusions. As irrational. As illogical. As romanticizing the brute facts of existence. We don’t like what it is, so we reframe it as something different, and when this false realty comes crashing back in- cognitive dissonance
That’s the biggest struggle with suicide. Far from being a mark of craziness or shame or guilt, it is in fact, seemingly, the most logical conclusion we can arrive at. This is, I believe, what we find in the main character.
This is also how the film arrives at its necessary appeal to ambiguity. This allows it to carry what is a difficult tension. As we arrive at the ending, it becomes clear that what is framing the main characters struggle is two competing images of the world, of her life. In the mirror image everything is backwards to what it is in reality. The proper R is a backwards R. She is stuck living through both worlds, but living them in tension, from two different vantage points or perspectives which keep getting more and more disillusioned as the story pushes forward. It all culminates with a final moment- her struggle finally committing to the logic of her situation. Her sitting in the chair with gun aimed at her chin, precisely because it’s the most rational conclusion she can come to.
And then the camera fades away. We don’t hear the gun. We don’t see the gun. So what really happened? Here we are left with different possibilities. Different interpretations concerning what is real and what is the illusion. Was she already dead and the whole movie is in fact an illusion? Was she dead because of the car accident, and this is her mind playing out an outcome of that suicide? Or is the movie playing out in real time, with the ending imagining the different outcomes of suicide or survival? Is the romanticized life and house that emerges from her potentially setting down the gun and walking away the illusion or the reality? Is it the letting go of the romanticized illusion in the face of a successful suicide attempt? Or embracing a greater truth, however illogical it might be? In many ways the image of that ending is both an image of her enslavement and her salvation.
There is so much here to consider, and so much of it lands for me in a big way, leading me to reflect more deeply on my own journey. This uncertainty is so real to the process of wrestling with suicide. In some sense the tension will always exist, if simply because life can’t be made sense of on a purely logical and rational level. To think rationally and logically, and to consider where this leads with integrity and honesty, would force certain implications to hold true. To find a reason not to commit suicide is to seek, and indeed trust in something irrational- a stuffed animal that has been made into an imaginary friend for example.
I live with this tension all the time. I know the dark places this film is willing to go to only far too well. That’s where I found its gut punch to be so effective. It feels true. It feels real. That’s where I found it compelling. Its rare to find a film dealing with this subject so honestly in this way. Usually films that deal with suicide are looking to balance that with appeals to manufactured hope or redemption, or use it as grounds to say something about life and its worth apart from any real, concrete foundation. This film takes a different path, one that perhaps might feel more difficult to process, and thus easier to dismiss, but one that is more authentic to the struggle of living with the tension. It’s a reminder too, for those who have never experienced the struggle, to recognize the importance of honest approaches. The last thing that satisfies suicidal thoughts are appeals to illusions, to fabricated answers that tell us the experience of this tension is illogical or a harmful delusion. That only leaves us feeling more out of control.
To echo another phrase from Sometimes I Think About Dying, “The more I think about the movie, the more I like it.” Precisely because it validates my desire to live with integrity. It validates the fact that my experience of this tension appears to be true.
The Stories of my Life 