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Writer-director-actress Joanna Arnow’s elliptical, drily funny feature debut, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, so vividly captures the way everyday routine can become purgatorial that when I say I couldn’t wait for it to end, I mean it as a compliment. Movies are most often used as escape vehicles; Feeling tends to feel closer to a mirror, many of its pains and humiliations marked with universality even if its narrative isn’t.

In Feeling, Arnow plays Ann, a 33-year-old whose life seems to have no corners safe from undermining. She’s micromanaged in the corporate position she’s held for the last three and a half years within an inch of her life, and she’s so underappreciated by her supervisors that she’s unceremoniously handed a star-shaped one-year anniversary trophy early in the film. She keeps in close contact with her family, but her parents (played by Arnow’s real-life mother and father) are exhaustingly passive-aggressive. She doesn’t have very many friends; she’s never had a relationship that wasn’t strictly sexual, something the film explores with unwavering frankness. (The candidness of her self-portraiture, as the critic Beatrice Loayza has pointed out, especially recalls Chantal Akerman and Lena Dunham in its multidimensional nakedness and, like the latter in particular, the deadpan presentation of it.) 

Read the full review on South Sound.