35 Shots of Rum

35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums, 2009) is a French drama by Claire Denis you can watch online on iFILM. Lionel drives the Paris metro. His daughter Joséphine lives in the next room. They have a closeness that functions almost as its own private language — and the film is about the moment when that can no longer hold.

A colleague's retirement, a neighbor who has been patient for a long time, a woman from Lionel's past who never fully disappeared — small pressures that accumulate into something unavoidable. Denis builds the entire film from gestures and glances rather than dialogue, and it works because Alex Descas and Mati Diop (later the director of Atlantics) are precise enough to carry it. The one scene near the end where the film briefly opens up earns every quiet minute that came before it.

Consciously indebted to Ozu's Late Spring, 35 Shots of Rum is the kind of film that seems to be about very little and stays with you for days. Stream it online on iFILM.