I'm Totally Fine

Grief doesn't present in just one way. Grief literally messes with your mind. Someone dies, and you can still hear their footsteps in the hall. You think you see them on a crowded street. You can't delete their number from your phone. Grief is a tough subject to address because it isn't understood or accepted in society. You lose a parent and you have to be at work the next week. The Victorians may have had some weird ideas but they were right on the money with the custom of wearing a black armband for some time after a death. The black armband makes visible the loss experienced. Brandon Dermer's "I'm Totally Fine" is a funny and charming movie, with two entertaining performances from Jillian Bell and Natalie Morales at its center, but where it really works is in its understanding of grief, and how grief can turn someone's world—and mind—upside down. The best sci-fi illuminates darker corners of the human condition and screenwriter Alisha Ketry has crafted a sci-fi context illustrating the destabilizing experience of grief in thought-provoking ways.

Vanessa (Bell) is grieving the loss of Jennifer (Morales), her best friend since childhood. The two of them created a business together, selling organic soda, and were just about to celebrate their first distribution deal when Jennifer dropped dead from a pre-existing and yet undiagnosed condition. Vanessa's world is turned upside down. She is first seen sobbing in her car on the side of the highway, while on her way to a luxurious villa she and Jennifer rented to throw a party for the launch of their company. Now there will be no party. Vanessa goes out to the location anyway, to "clear her head." She wanders through the empty mansion. She's completely disoriented and becomes even more so when Jennifer—or someone who looks exactly like Jennifer—strolls into the kitchen.

This Jennifer may be an identical twin of the real and dead Jennifer, but she speaks robotically, and claims she is an extraterrestrial, sent on a mission to earth to study the ways of humans. Alien Jennifer has inherited all of the real Jennifer's memories, and yet alien Jennifer does not understand life on earth, it is a mystery to her. She murmurs into little dictaphone-type extraterrestrial gadget observations like "Human has turned anger on herself.” At first, Vanessa refuses to believe that what is happening is really happening. She is clearly having some kind of psychotic break, she thinks. Grief has made her "see things." She literally rubs her eyes, hoping alien robotic-voiced Jennifer will go away.

What then follows may be somewhat expected, but it's nonetheless pleasurable to watch it unfold. Vanessa finds herself comforted being in the presence of her old friend, or at least the appearance of the presence. Alien Jennifer is baffled by so much of what she sees. Humans are very weird to her! What’s all this crying and laughing business? When she tries to put all these things together in a way that makes sense—to her and to her “bosses” back home—her conclusions remind me of one of my favorite poems, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by Craig Raine. The Martian describes an alarm clock thus:

"In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up."