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joseph-m-morris
Reviews
Life Overtakes Me (2019)
Haunting
My wife and I watch this is part of the Oscar documentary shorts that were in theaters, and we both agreed that this was our favorite (with In the Absence taking second place).
It seems like a lot of people reviewing here were watching this in the hopes of getting a detailed medical account of Resignation Syndrome. But that isn't the purpose: this is is a beautiful introduction, well thought-out visually, to what the refugee experience is, as encapsulated in that medical condition.
The difference between the situations that these refugees were fleeing from, and the stability that was offered by Sweden, seemed to be the cause of the children to enter into this state - like a merger between severe depression and a coma. I'm sure they're not doing it in any way that is intentional, in the way that we usually use that word, but it does make a peculiar kind of sense: that if they are immobilized in Sweden, they won't be taken back to a traumatic situation.
The visuals during voiceovers of journalists and medical experts are fallow fields and forests in winter. About halfway through the movie I realized how symbolic these are of the children, waiting for conditions to be right to come out and flourish.