Manchester by the Sea

Lee Chandler works as an apartment janitor in Boston, keeping to himself and picking fights he does not explain. When his older brother Joe dies, Lee returns to the fishing town where he grew up and finds that Joe has named him guardian of his teenage son, Patrick. As Lee handles the funeral and the boy's disrupted life, flashbacks fill in the catastrophe that emptied him out and ended his marriage.

Serious critics singled out Lonergan's writing, which lets grief sit inside ordinary logistics: a body that cannot be buried until the ground thaws, a broken furnace. The film withholds the recovery arc its structure seems to promise. Casey Affleck plays a man who has stopped expecting to feel better; Michelle Williams registers a grief that kept moving while his did not.

For a clinician it is a study of mourning that does not complete. Lee's guilt attaches to one irreversible act, and the film declines to let him work it through or forgive himself. His flat affect reads less as avoidance than as a settled verdict. Mourning and melancholia sit side by side without being named.