Review: She Came to Me

By John Corrado

★★ (out of 4)

The latest film from New York writer-director Rebecca Miller (her first since Maggie’s Plan in 2015), She Came to Me is an absurd, operatic melodrama that takes the bones of a romantic comedy and remixes it into a sort of soap opera. The result is somewhat of an interesting misfire.

Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage) is a renowned opera composer who has hit a dry spell while working on his latest piece. He has funders breathing down his neck for new work, but is suffering writer’s block brought on by a nervous breakdown.

Steven is married to his psychiatrist Patricia (Anne Hathaway), and stepdad to her teenaged son Julian (Evan Ellison). While his creative well has pretty much run dry, a chance encounter in a bar with a woman named Katrina (Marisa Tomei) shakes something loose in him that inspires his latest work.

Katrina is a tugboat operator docked in Brooklyn, and she invites him aboard her boat. Passions erupt, things happen. The trouble is that Katrina is prone to becoming fixated on men, having been treated in the past for being “addicted to romance.” The film is also the story of Julian’s high school girlfriend Tereza (Harlow Jane), and her parents Magdalena (Cold War‘s Joanna Kulig) and Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), who is a court stenographer and Civil War impersonator.

I’m not going to reveal all of the ways that these characters come together, because there is an element of surprise to the film if you don’t know where it’s going. But Miller’s screenplay strains credibility with all of its various contrivances. The film struggles to settle on a tone, and the story becomes so heightened that it’s hard to really take any of it seriously, even as it introduces a number of serious subjects. The movie takes a dramatic turn partway through that makes it be about something very different, and I don’t think it’s done in a way that is particularly well handled.

Miller’s film feels overly ambitious, including multiple hot button story threads, various aspect ratio changes throughout the film, and original opera sequences that border on parody. The characters feel like eccentric stereotypes, making a series of choices that barely ring true to real life, including mental health issues such as Patricia’s increasingly scrupulous OCD and Katrina’s own obsessive nature that are largely treated as comical character quirks.

While the screenplay doesn’t really allow the actors to develop their characters beyond a series of traits and tics, this is still a talented ensemble that does their best with the material. Miller is able to utilize Dinklage as a heartthrob romantic lead. He probably breathes the most depth into his character, though it can be fun to watch actresses like Hathaway and Tomei eat up their exaggerated roles. The film also features a nice score by Bryce Dessner and a new Bruce Springsteen song over the end credits.

It’s hard to tell if Miller was going for satire or sincerity, as she zigs and zags through these various plot developments. The story takes turns that leave us unsure how to feel, and there is an absurdity to it all that keeps the dramatic beats from ever really registering. The ending also cuts things short and just sort of fizzles out, feeling anticlimactic after quite a bit of buildup. This is a film that doesn’t really work, but I can’t entirely write it off, simply because of how bizarre and audacious the whole thing feels within the confines of a romantic comedy. The result is a film so narratively and tonally all over the place that it almost becomes fascinating to watch. Almost.