CONTINUE - Mark Reviews Movies

Continue, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2024

Continue announces at the start that it's based on true events. Presumably, these belong to writer/director/star Nadine Crocker, whose film follows a woman's life through the lows and highs after a suicide attempt. How much of the story of Crocker's Dean mirrors the filmmaker/actor's own, of course, isn't for us to speculate on in depth, because life and art are two different things. What can be said of the filmmaker's depiction of depression is that it is raw and honest, so whatever she has brought from personal experience and/or observation to this material is authentically represented here.

The story opens with Dean, alone in her apartment as she drinks, sobs, rages, and collapses to the ground from physical and emotional exhaustion. After that, she goes into the bathroom, and as blood drains from her body from self-inflicted cuts, someone arrives just in time to break down the door, find Dean, and call for paramedics.

In the hospital, Dean is visited by a psychiatrist named Janet (Emily Deschanel), who knows this isn't the woman's first attempt. Despite Dean's insistence that she's feeling better and could have her entire life upended if she winds up in a psychiatric facility, the doctor arranges for her patient's involuntary institutionalization.

The resulting story isn't about mental health treatment in any clinical or medical way, even if Dean does participate in group and one-on-one therapy sessions during her time at the facility, while also taking some regimen of medication while under near-constant observation and care. No, Crocker's screenplay takes something of an optimistic view of Dean's psychological recovery, in that it comes down to making new friends, strengthening long-standing relationships, and having breakthroughs about her past. It might not be accurate from a medical standpoint, but in terms of drama, this way of looking at living with and confronting depression does get at something real.

The new friends include Bria (Lio Tipton), who's in the facility because of drug addiction, and Taryn (Annapurna Sriram), who becomes Dean's roommate and knows something of what she experienced. A real sense of community and camaraderie forms between this group of hurt and struggling people, which expands beyond just these three characters as the story progresses. Yes, it may be a bit simplistic to suggest that all anyone needs to deal with trauma and psychological ailments is the support of people who understand and care for a person, but simple things can still be true.

Crocket's screenplay isn't all sunny about these things, either. The stay in the facility includes a moment of connection with a silent inmate, whose smiles and playful attitude turn out to be covering much darker thoughts. Dean is eventually released from the institution after that event, when she plainly tells Janet that, while she isn't certain what life after this place will bring or if she'll be prepared to handle it, she does want to live—a feeling she admits she hasn't had in a long time.

Her new life includes a romance with Trenton (Shiloh Fernandez), a music supervisor for the movies who makes his own music in his downtime. The two connect over that, as well as some shared history and family issues—namely that neither has parents in a very real or practical sense. That's at the heart of Dean's psychological woes, as she reveals to Trenton that her mother died, either intentionally or accidentally by her own hand, and her father followed a few years later. Trenton knows some of that feeling, watching his father die of lung cancer and his mother, in his mind, choose an abusive partner over him.

We get to know these characters—not only in terms of pasts that define them to one degree or another, but also in how they connect or hesitate to do so with others. That romance is key here, if only for one scene later on, after everything seems to be going more than well for the couple—with Trenton learning everything about Dean, sticking around, and even discussing some next step their relationship, while Dean is open with him in a way that she is with no one else. In one moment with the man (played by Anthony Caravella) who saved her life, everything switches without warning, bringing Dean to a place of self-hatred and attempting to push away Trenton.

The script is frank enough about the particulars of depression that we comprehend and feel the sudden shift. Trenton understands it, too, if only because Dean explains the feeling to him, and Crocker doesn't go for cheap and easy melodrama here, turning depression into some means of conflict within the story. No, Trenton does get it, and in a couple of candid scenes with Dean's sister Bennett (Kat Foster) and Janet, Dean realizes just how much connection exists between her and people who might other seem distant or looking at matters from a theoretical point of view.

The film is smart in that way, because the story becomes a tapestry of lost souls and pained minds looking for ways to get through each day. Continue is about characters who and relationships that are genuine, and if there's a flaw in the mechanics of this tale, it's the finale introduces the idea of plot mechanics in the first place. The ending here is a misstep, which turns this intimate story into one that's more a cautionary tale, but considering how much the film does and gets right until that point, that ultimate resolution is only an unfortunate stumble in the big picture.

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