Guy Lodge Film Critic“Dying isn’t simple, is it?” That question is asked at three separate points in “I Was a Simple Man,” and with each repetition, it sounds slightly less rhetorical, less worldly-wise, more loaded with anxious uncertainty.
Christopher Makoto Yogi’s hushed, ruminative study of an elderly man’s last days in Oahu doesn’t quite settle on an answer either.
It considers the troubling weight of impending death on the victim — as failing health, glitching memory and drifting ghosts of the past combine to disorienting effect — as well as on his burdened, emotionally conflicted family.
Yet there’s serene peace here amid the trauma: At the film’s most lyrical points, mortality doesn’t seem a threat or a ticking clock, so much as a.
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