The Tale

The Tale (2018) is Jennifer Fox's quietly devastating drama, available to watch online on iFILM, with Laura Dern as a documentary filmmaker named Jennifer. Her mother digs up a story Jennifer wrote at thirteen, and the words on the page no longer match the memory she has carried for decades.

What she once filed away as her first romance starts to look like something else entirely. Jennifer tracks down the riding coach and the running mentor from that summer, checks dates against letters, and keeps colliding with her thirteen-year-old self, played by Isabelle Nélisse, who remembers it her own way. Elizabeth Debicki and Jason Ritter play the adults whose accounts won't line up. The film recasts and reshoots scenes mid-thought, the way memory edits itself to keep a person standing.

Fox built this from her own life, and that's why it lands without a single false note or easy tear. It's a cold, grown-up reckoning rather than a tidy survivor story, and that restraint is exactly what makes it hard to look away. Stream The Tale (2018) online on iFILM.