Pieces of a Woman is a film about the grief of a failed home birth, where the cause is not quite clear. All of the characters struggle with the incident in different, diverse ways - ranging from anger, to revenge, to relapsed drug and alcohol addiction, to the cold isolation of our protagonist, Martha (Venessa Kirby). While this plot is not at all unfamiliar, the film excels in delivering emotion through the camera. Lengthy, single-shot sequences move through rooms, seemingly pausing on where the emotion is most felt. Running water in a sink filled with old dishes, a dead plant in the window, and someone setting a table in the background of a more dominant conversation are all examples of moments when the person talking is not the focus of drama. The camera has its own point of view.

The third film from Hungarian writer/director team Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó, Pieces of a Woman falls into the lineage of modern-traditional dramas like Non-Fiction, Burning, and The Meyerowitz Stories, where classic filmmaking techniques meet modern pace and themes. It’s not afraid to be slow in moments where the emotional state of the story feels endless. The focus surrounds characters instead of centralizes them, reserving the hard-cut, close-in style shots for when the tension is the highest. Like a play, the actors move through rooms as if there were no camera at all, seamlessly interrupting and then re-starting conversations. Each character has their own motivations and internal logic, which gives the world tension even though it surrounds a very personal, and deeply internal theme. The actions never feel out of character, or brash, even when they have every reason to be. In a lesser movie drinking glasses would have been thrown through living room windows, but instead the protagonist stands in silence, trying to internalize what was just said to her, and then leaves, because the reality of what you or I would probably do in that situation is: we’d just leave.

The progressive complications in this film is that the protagonist’s family, specifically the mother, is pressuring her to pursue, and testify to, legal action against the midwife at her home birth - a conversation made even more complicated by the quiet antagonism of their relationship. In a single shot, which lasts seven minutes and thirty-five seconds, we see this tension come to a breaking point. Conversations start with small talk in the living room, which acts as a hub between a few rooms that the camera flows in and out of freely. For a while, our point-of-view follows the most dominant part of the conversation. The mother holds the floor, momentarily, to tell them about how she’s been arranging furniture for friend’s houses, then the brother-in-law makes small talk about playing music. The sister gets bored and leaves to set the table, away in the background by the window the scene began in (not gone entirely), transitioning back to the living room only when Sean (Martha’s partner, Shia LaBeouf) asks if she needs help. Martha lingers, isolated in the kitchen with her mother, not talking, and then in the sitting room alone, getting a drink. She wanders through the main conversation and then to the record player to put on music, which embodies well the listless feeling of being at a family gathering with nothing to do. Until the conversation turns to how the brother-in-law’s friend quit making music because he wanted to have a child. Then the camera stops on Martha only. Closer in. No longer fluid. She interrupts them, but the camera stays on her - even when the tension in the room is bubbling up, even when people are back-peddling and apologizing, or trying to shake it off as not a big deal. “Why are we even here?” Martha says.

Her mother takes the floor to answer, still in the same shot but moving again as the brother-in-law storms out of the room (in just the corner of the frame). A cousin, who is the lawyer for the civil case against the midwife, stands next to the mother for backup, but the rest of the characters splinter - adding their two cents before leaving. The sister goes off to her husband, yelling “you need therapy!” Sean disappears into the sitting room out of frame to pour another drink. The cousin stops the music Martha put on earlier and then leaves the frame too. Only the mother and Martha remain, to break the underlying conversational tension into plain, outright speak, at the window where the entire scene began.

This kind of setting and scene choreography is crucial to the mood of the film. In a climate where tension and actions rely heavily on quick-cutting scenes and reaction shots, Pieces of a Woman lingers. Steadily building atmosphere and mood, until the moment to cut away is unbearable. This happens a few times in the film, but even when the shots are tighter and cuts are more frequent, the point of view is always conscious. Crossing over store shelves, following the meandering protagonist in her grief, we’re shown the image of Martha through the other side of a produce shelf. Almost voyeuristically watching as she picks up an apple, smells it, then puts it down to move on to the next apple, until finally we cut to a close up when she’s found the apple she wants.

This lingering, distracted point of view, can help to give dimensionality to prose and dialogue. One of the techniques I’ve been working on in my writing this year has been what Robert McKee calls Trialogue, in his book Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action on the Page…, which is defined as “the triangular relationship between two characters and the third thing through which they funnel their struggle.” When we talk to someone on more than just a superficial level, there is often something between us that may or may not come to the abrupt surface of a conversation. Whether that’s an object that interrupts the conversation (as in Marriage Story, when a kitchen wall is between a tense exchange that the characters must navigate when they want to see one another’s face in the other room), or a pre-occupation (as in Private Life, when reviewing a nearly pornographic piece of fiction from their niece highlights the vulgarity and oddity of a couple’s struggle to conceive and copulate). The third thing can provide a way to say something direct without the writing feeling too on-the-nose or obvious. Pieces of a Woman’s third thing is grief. Characters often go to great lengths to avoid dealing with their own grief (offering to move to a different state and start life over, insisting legal action be taken and justice be served, or returning to work before properly dealing with the damage done both mentally and physically to the body), often resulting in even greater unhappiness. The characters and the plot are more immense because they are preoccupied and struggling.

Pieces of a Woman is a beautiful study on grief and time film by Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó out now on Netflix.