While the film ultimately settles into a place of empathy, McGowan allows room for all kinds of messier emotions before coming to this conclusion, using Yoli’s fierce survival instinct and the sisters’ vulnerability with each other to give voice to the visceral, unsympathetic anger Yoli feels towards Elfrieda for daring to follow in their father’s footsteps. And in addition to McGowan’s pacing, Pill and Gadon’s sibling dynamic is the other avenue through which the director looks to capture not only the agony of waiting, but also the anger that might otherwise go unexpressed. This anxiety follows Yoli into the outside world, along with the pale color palette of Elfrieda’s hospital room, the shadow of Elfrieda’s anguish seems to subtly alter the entire landscape of Yoli’s world. What McGowan captures well in All My Puny Sorrows is the precise agony of waiting - Yoli’s faded grief for her father pales in comparison to the urgency of her worry for her sister, but what induces anxiety the most is the liminal space Elfrieda occupies between dead and alive. McGowan’s visual world echoes the purgatory each sister finds herself stuck in, with both Elfrieda’s hospital room and the outside world Yoli navigates bathed in pale blue and gray tones, a harsh, unforgiving light that evokes a constant sense of unending winter. Elfrieda sees her own future in her father’s past, while Yoli is haunted by something that hasn’t yet happened, but feels just as powerless as she was as a child. Perhaps predictably, the incident reignites the sisters’ grief for their father, but it also leaves them in an odd suspended state, where history repeating itself seems almost inevitable. McGowan adopts a glacial pace in the weeks following Elfrieda’s suicide attempt, allowing the film to wallow in a grief that refuses to obey any linear logic. Having left their religious background behind after their father’s suicide, Yoli (Pill) is a divorced writer, battling her way through a manuscript, while Elfrieda (Gadon), outwardly successful in every way, is deeply depressed and attempts to take her own life, causing a rift between the sisters.
All My Puny Sorrows builds a striking purgatorial atmosphere that transcends any by-the-number grief narrative, but the film is burdened by an unwieldly and overly verbose screenplay.īased on Miriam Toews’ 2014 autofiction novel of the same name, Michael McGowan’s All My Puny Sorrows stars Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon as two Mennonite sisters whose family is haunted by a tendency toward suicide.
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