Anne (Deragh Campbell) is a young woman who works at a daycare center and when we first see her, we cannot help but think that she's indeed the perfect person for the job; she throws herself into it with all the heedless joy and enthusiasm of her charges. The problem is that she gets a little too into the whole playing aspect and tends to forget her very real responsibilities as the adult in the room, which brings her into regular conflict with the other teachers. Outside of the classroom, we see her as a shy and somewhat socially awkward person whose few personal relationships—especially with her mother (Lawrene Denkers) and Matt (Matt Johnson), the guy she just began dating after drunkenly meeting him at a coworker’s wedding—are all off in some way. Although the film never specifically says anything about it, it's clear that Anne suffers from some social anxiety that can make even the most benign situation or conversation turn on a dime towards a meltdown.
At the beginning of the period of time in Anne’s life that makes up the film (roughly a couple weeks or so), Anne attends the aforementioned wedding and one of the bachelorette party activities involves tandem skydiving. For most people who have sensibly never done such a thing before, the notion of jumping out of an airplane may not seem like the most soothing of activities, but it seems to unlock something within her beyond the desire to take another leap. Although she has largely been able to keep her issues at bay, she's now unable to reconcile the sense of freedom and abandon that she felt in the air with the more controlled aspects of typical adult life and this leads to increasingly erratic behavior on her part.
Because Anne works with children, there's the nagging sense that the film is going to try to milk Anne’s issues for cheap melodrama by contriving a scene that involves one of her students being put into jeopardy. Happily, Radwanski is not interested in giving us the kind of empty-headed thriller that throws anything character-related out the window in order to focus on the machinations of the plot. Here, there's very little of what could be described as “plot” as Radwanski, whose previous films “Tower” (2012) and “How Heavy the Hammer” (2015) have also featured central characters with social interaction issues, is more interested in giving us a character study of a type of person that we probably all know. Radwanski makes viewers see the world through their viewpoint in a manner that favors empathy over judgement, even during the times when Anne crosses some serious behavioral lines.
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