Something, Anything

Something, Anything is an attentive, quiet indie film that was never widely released but is now streaming on Netflix. It’s a rarity in the film world—a movie that takes spiritual questions seriously and respectfully but doesn’t try to answer them all for you.

Over the course of a year, Peggy gets married, suffers a deep loss, and suddenly finds herself wondering what she ever wanted in the first place. At the start, she moves into her marriage like many others. Anyone who has been a newlywed will recognize the act of placing a set of canisters on the kitchen counter or making a bed with new sheets, feeling that by doing so you are somehow establishing a home.

At the same time, stacks of new belongings hover in the corners, taking up space as Peggy and Mark begin to make a life together. Peggy is a real estate agent, and the movie is shot through with scenes and images of people trying to buy, sell, make, move into, or move out of their homes.

When things change, Peggy cannot look at her life with the same eyes. She can’t move ahead with life as usual—the game plan no longer makes sense to her. She decides to make some changes, reevaluating her belongings and her life as she wonders about faith, meaning, and purpose.

Writer and director Paul Harrill gives the material things of our everyday lives the heft they deserve—symbols of our needs and desires, trail markers of our life’s journey, and sometimes burdens that weigh us down and hold us back.

Something, Anything is a thoughtful meditation on what we choose to value and the reasons we do what we do. (Self Reliant Film)