Nowhere Special (2021) - It's Special.

 

★★★★☆

It’s easy to summarize the film based on a true story in just one sentence: a single father (James Norton) dying of some cancer is looking for a new family to adopt his son (Daniel Lamont) who is still too little to know what adopt is and death means. But it’s not easy at all to take the mood and weight of the situation. Just imagine you were the father, how were you supposed to put up with losing your own life as well as your beloved son?

‘Nowhere Special’ nevertheless, keeps away from being a melodramatic, tear-jerking film like you might’ve expected despite its great potential to be one. In fact, the story’s being told in a rather humble realistic tone. Emotional, heart-wrenching scenes are rare if you count those ‘story time before bed’ and the ‘meaning of death’ explained by the father to his son over a dead beetle found under the tree and a picture book about the extinction of the dinosaurs, as something emotional and heartbreaking! Most of the runtime is spent on interviews the social worker arranges for the father to pick the right family to adopt his son before his time’s up! That’s, of course, the toughest decision he’ll have to make in his life, and it’s immersive enough for us to feel the toughness of it weighing him down with the screenplay so well written and acted. What’s special about ‘Nowhere Special’ is that it’s not apt to make you cry while it’s playing but your tears will definitely well up and burst when the end credits start to roll!

I feel like this is not a film to simply make you cry but to make you strong enough instead to be not afraid of death itself. Though its theme raises the pain of parting and dying, it’s by no means a film of so much grief and sadness. You never see the father hang his head, or paint himself to a corner, or keep complaining and throwing a tantrum. He’s frustrated sometimes absolutely, but he never loses his cool and positivity. That’s what the life he’s lived has taught him like he says. That’s what we’re all supposed to learn from ‘Nowhere Special’ as well.

Death or separation is part of the circle of life, of suffering so to speak. It’s happening not sometime in the future like you normally think or feel but every single second from the cradle to the grave. It’s an irreversible course but it’s never the end or the beginning of anything! There’s no such a thing in the circle of life that just goes round and round and round. All you can do is, face it, accept it, and try not to be afraid of it. Therefore it’s important to make up your mind where you want to go right now.

To be honest, for a little while, I did feel like I was all peaceful and okay to go as I was lying on the ground with my eyes closed after watching the film. Guess that’s another special thing about ‘Nowhere Special’.