Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
When a young mother's home birth ends in unfathomable tragedy, she begins a year-long odyssey of mourning that fractures relationships with loved ones in this deeply personal story of a woman learning to live alongside her loss.
Pieces of a Woman is anchored by Vanessa Kirby's extraordinary, raw performance — widely considered one of the best of 2020 — and supported by strong work from Shia LaBeouf and Ellen Burstyn. The film's opening 24-minute single-take home birth sequence is a cinematographic and directorial tour de force, genuinely harrowing and immersive. The plot, while emotionally honest in its portrayal of grief, meanders in its second and third acts, with the courtroom subplot feeling underdeveloped and somewhat disconnected from the emotional core. The film covers familiar grief-drama territory and doesn't radically reinvent the genre, though its unflinching intimacy gives it a distinct voice. The ending, while quietly hopeful, is subdued to the point of feeling somewhat unresolved for some viewers, though it suits the film's thematic ethos of living alongside rather than overcoming loss.