Demolition

Demolition (2016) is a drama laced with dry comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée of Dallas Buyers Club, it hands Jake Gyllenhaal one of his quietest, strangest roles.

Davis is a successful investment banker whose wife dies in a car crash. The shock is that he feels almost nothing. What rattles him instead is a vending machine that swallowed his money without giving up the candy. So he writes a complaint to the company — and the letter spills into a confession about his whole marriage. Karen, a customer service rep played by Naomi Watts, writes back, and their odd correspondence starts pulling him out of the numbness. To figure out what is broken inside, Davis takes things apart: the fridge, a bathroom door, eventually the entire house. Chris Cooper plays his grieving father-in-law.

Vallée films grief not as weeping but as literal demolition, stripping a life down to the studs. It is a tender, off-kilter, sometimes funny portrait of a man who has to wreck everything before he can rebuild himself. Stream Demolition (2016) online on iFILM.