Pieces of a Woman

Pieces of a Woman is worth considering for Vanessa Kirby, provided there is an appetite for a difficult drama that becomes frustratingly emphatic. Director Kornél Mundruczó and writer Kata Wéber follow a woman through childbirth, infant loss and the grief that unsettles her marriage. They begin by asking us to stay with a physical ordeal, then struggle to make the aftermath equally persuasive. The acting remains compelling when the writing becomes overbearing.

The opening childbirth sequence gives cinematographer Benjamin Loeb a demanding job: sustain our attention without the relief of a visible cut. The uninterrupted shot works because we keep looking at the woman giving birth, rather than congratulating the camera for staying with her. We were frightened by the bodily effort of it, and by the sense that there was no opportunity to step away. The performance supplies the urgency, and the length of the shot allows it to build.

Once Martha Weiss is grieving, her restraint becomes the film’s chief strength. She does not make every feeling immediately available, and we never took that difficulty as a failure to communicate. The performance makes the exhaustion of carrying on understandable without turning every moment into a lesson about bereavement. This asks for patience from an audience, and for long stretches the film is willing to wait alongside her.

Shia LaBeouf and Ellen Burstyn bring force to the surrounding domestic drama, but the confrontations are less convincing than the actors within them. Kata Wéber’s screenplay increasingly gives the distress a familiar melodramatic shape. We can believe the pain and still find the way it is presented too deliberate. The quieter acting has already made the suffering intelligible, so the more emphatic passages feel unnecessary.

Dávid Jancsó’s editing cannot quite make the later passages feel as concentrated as the opening. After that sustained stretch of childbirth, the movement through the grief becomes scattered, and the domestic drama loses momentum. This is more than the inevitable lowering of intensity after such an ordeal: individual scenes ask for emotion without always earning it from what precedes them. There is room for a slower pace here, but too often we become conscious of the scenes being arranged to produce a response.

Howard Shore’s score adds pressure where the actors need space, insisting on sadness that is already clear. Sylvain Lemaitre’s production design is less distracting, although the domestic scenes can feel arranged for confrontation rather than lived in. The settings never pull our attention away from the performances, which is welcome when so much else is competing for it. Too often, though, the staging and music make us conscious of the effort to move us.

As a grief drama, it is strongest when it allows sorrow to be awkward and difficult to read. Its attempts to make that sorrow more legible are the chief reason we hesitate to recommend it without qualification. The performance at its centre deserves attention, but the uneven writing makes 127 minutes feel longer than they need to. Choose it for the acting, and only if infant loss is something you are willing to sit with tonight.