[Thoughts] Demolition [Review]

This time I thought I’d review Demolition!!

Trailer here.

Story

Davis works at an investment bank run by his father-in-law, Phil, and is well enough regarded that those around him treat him as a cut above. Then he is caught in a car accident: his wife Julia is killed and he himself is injured. In hospital, Davis tries to buy sweets from a vending machine, and the machine fails to deliver. Unable to hold back an irritation he cannot quite name, he immediately rings customer support to complain. Somewhere in the middle of the tirade, Davis finds himself pouring out his grief at losing his wife. Karen, the representative on the other end, is moved by his situation and ends up telling him about her own painful past. By the time the call ends, both Davis and Karen feel calmer. His grief, however, is far from healed. Davis returns to work early, but can no longer find any meaning in it as he once did. On his commute, he confesses to a fellow passenger he knows by sight: “It hit me that I never loved Julia. She died, and I don’t feel any grief, any pain at all.”
— Wikipedia

Thoughts

“It hit me that I never loved Julia. She died, and I don’t feel any grief, any pain at all.”

Davis, our protagonist, is an outstanding banker.

And yet, when he lost his wife, he felt nothing at all.

This is only my reading, but I think Davis understood exactly what an outstanding man is supposed to look like — and had been performing it.

Which is to say he is an intensely rational man. He had spent his whole life playing the “Davis” that everyone around him wanted.

When you lose your wife, the performance calls for weeping, for visible grief.

But in the moment, his real feelings overran his reason, and the performance failed. That threw him — and that, I think, is why he says: “It hit me that I never loved Julia. She died, and I don’t feel any grief, any pain at all.”

As the title tells you, the film’s theme is demolition.

And just as the trailer shows, Davis really does start taking apart everything around him lol

The house, for one. And in a sense, the life of the woman he meets by chance gets taken apart too lol

Demolishing the “house” means finding the real Davis — a quiet, understated story that I think sits very well with Japanese audiences.