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Movie Review: 'Sophie Jones'

A rare movie that wrestles with grief from a very unique perspective.

By Sean PatrickPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Sophie Jones stars actress Jessica Barr in the title role of a teenager who is in a tailspin following the death of her mother. Sophie is 16 years old and when we meet her, it’s not long since the passing of her mother. Sophie is still adjusting to the loss and as we watch we see her seemingly playing with her late mother’s ashes. It’s inconceivable and yet, childish curiosity is a trait that fits the character of Sophie.

Sophie is curious about everything. Having lost her mother, ostensibly the go-to source for all the things she should learn about being a woman, Sophie finds herself unmoored and thus eager to try out many different aspects of life. The main question that she will never get the chance to talk with her mother about is sexuality. Thus, much of Sophie Jones centers on questions of sex and Sophie’s curious approach to boys.

Two boys in particular hover in Sophie’s realm. The first is Riley (Tristan Decker), an awkward kid who has long been one of Sophie’s closest friends while also harboring a long standing crush on her. The other is a fellow theater kid named Kevin (Skyler Verity). Kevin holds a particular fascination for Sophie as she approaches him for what she thinks will be a brief sexual encounter. Instead, she can’t go through with it and the two begin an off and on relationship centered on Sophie’s desire for and fear of sex.

There are many competing desires at play in the mind of Sophie Jones. The simple answer to understanding her sexual desire is the desire to be a grown up. Part of what Sophie is looking for is to speed life along to a place where her grief can’t catch her. Seemingly, Sophie thinks if she starts acting like an adult, then adulthood won’t be so far away and with that, the child’s need or desire for a mother.

Another, psycho-analytic take on Sophie is that she is very simply looking for ways to distract herself from grief. It’s a rather simple diagnosis but anyone who has suffered a loss eagerly looks for ways to be pulled away from the emotion of loss for a little while. What better way can Sophie imagine a distraction than in the arms of someone who desires her, who wants to be with her, someone to make her feel wanted.

Oftentimes, people dealing with grief look for ways of filling the void of the person that they’ve lost. It’s natural to seek out attention from people who can give you things that other people cannot give you. In Sophie’s case, she can never get back the unencumbered, unambiguous, everlasting love that only a parent can give. So she fills the void with the attention and approval of boys.

That’s a very surface level, sub-Freudian analysis of the character of Sophie Jones but I stand by it. I find the character, and the performance of that character by Jessica Barr, to be a fascinating examination of grief in a very unique form. Grief usually takes the form of agonizing sobs and confessions in movies. In Sophie Jones, the grief of this teenage girl is examined from a different direction. You can sense the sadness and the loss but it’s hidden behind this remarkable veneer of this young woman who refuses to crack.

Instead of letting us see her break down into sobs over the loss of her mother, we watch Sophie have a more melancholic intellectual breakdown. She makes selfish and quite odd decisions, she lashes out at people, she’s unreasonable and pushy. We are told by people in her sphere that she’s changed a lot since her mother’s death and these traits are indicative of how she’s changed. Perhaps down the road her grief will become more emotional but while we are with her, she is remote and incapable of demonstrating her emotional state.

This translates into a fascinating portrait of grief, unlike any I have seen before. You don’t often see the subject of loss from such an odd direction. It works brilliantly. The character of Sophie Jones is so much more interesting and unique than if she were more typically emotionally fraught. There is no one way to grieve and yet Hollywood often centralizes grief around big, demonstrative emotions. Sophie Jones is that rare movie that takes a different look at grief and succeeds with that choice.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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