Related: These Movies Perfectly Capture What It's Like To Have AnxietyĪll My Puny Sorrows drops the audience into the aftermath of decades of despair, with author Yoli dealing with a divorce and Elf a successful but despairing pianist.

Patriarch Jake (Donal Logue) died by suicide when the girls were relatively young, and the family has been coping ever since. These are Lottie (Mare Winningham) and her daughters, Elf ( Sarah Gadon) and Yoli ( Alison Pill), along with Aunt Tina (Mimi Kuzyk). The Von Riesens have lost many of their members in this way, their family tree having been cut down by misery, with only a few surviving, beautiful branches left lying in the leaves. All My Puny Sorrows, the new Canadian film from writer/director Michael McGowan, bridges the gap between those who understand suicide and those who don't it's simply one of the best movies about depression in decades.Īll My Puny Sorrows, based on the somewhat semi-autobiographical novel from Miriam Toews, focuses on a family who understands depression and suicide. To those without depression, the suicidal act (or the weeks in bed, with the afterthought of bathing too painful to even surmise) and the aforementioned quote make little sense. This passage from David Foster Wallace's epic novel Infinite Jest begins to describe suicidal ideation in a way most people with depression innately understand. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.

And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. Warning: This Article Addresses the Topic of Suicide and Self-Harm

All the puny sorrows