By Adam Nayman

The one direct allusion to assisted suicide in Every Day’s Like This is filtered through movie madness: discussing a potential date for the euthanasia of their terminally ill matriarch, a father and his two young-adult children agree that it would be best not to do it before the Oscars. Lev Lewis’ mournful short derives its emotional affect from the accrual of such chippy specifics: missed connections, a broken doorbell, the wrong brand of sardines prepared as a snack. There are hardly any showy moments for the actors, including the excellent Kacey Rohl, who’s physically and behaviourally unrecognizable one year after White Lie,a filmthat Lewis contributed to as a composer and editor, and to which Every Day’s Like This could function as an oblique companion piece. In that film, a callow kid fakes an illness until her life and those of the people around her become genuinely infected; what spreads between the participants here is a raw, tetchy solidarity that might otherwise be described as love.

Adam Nayman