Directed by Rachel Lambert | Written by Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Kevin Armento, and Katy Wright-Mead | 94 min | ▲▲△△△ | On VOD

Terrific title, folks. Really something special. But this melancholy office drama, while it reaches for some kind of wistful truth about loneliness, is centred on perhaps the dullest character to ever have a movie built around them.

Fran (Daisy Ridley, far, far away from the gig that put her name above the title of this little indie) works as an office manager in a cubicle farm somewhere in the gloomy Pacific Northwest. She seems entirely checked out from her coworkers and really from any kind of human contact, living in a world of her own. As the title suggests, the most interesting thing about her is she fantasizes about death, in strange, picturesque tableaus.

Into this world arrives a new coworker, Robert (Dave Merheje), who takes an interest in her, and vice versa. Cue a painfully awkward romance that slowly brings her out of her shell and reveals she’s both a little fragile and perhaps also unkind.

We get moments when Lambert’s film seems to be channeling Aki Kaurismäki without the self-conscious humour, or skating toward the dark undercurrents of a Todd Solondz drama, though characters in his pictures want things and Fran doesn’t know what she wants.

The lack of a real arc for Fran makes an occasionally frustrating watch, and Sometimes I Think About Dying doesn’t really work as a feature, but it’s abundantly clear why Daisy Ridley was attracted to the material: in Fran she shares hues we haven’t seen from her. The character is entirely plausible, so while Fran may be dull, Ridley’s performance isn’t.