"Things I Don’t Understand" – What Happens When We Die?

“You’ve got to get yourself together,

You’ve got stuck in a moment

And now you can’t get out of it.

Don’t say that later will be better…”

                                                            -U2

“Nothing fades as fast as the future,

Nothing clings like the past.”

                                                            -Peter Gabriel

                                                            “More Than This”

What really happens to us when we die? It almost seems like a foolish question to ask because we will only get to find out when we depart this mortal coil, and we won’t be able to tell anyone what it’s like. The only thing people can seem to agree on is that they move towards a “bright light,” but that only tells us so much. Nevertheless, we still look for an answer to this question mainly because it will confirm the things we are led to believe. At the same time, thinking about the future this deeply is not much different from being stuck in the past.

Movies like “Flatliners,” “The Sixth Sense,” and even “Ghost” have explored this subject in various ways, but David Spaltro’s “Things I Don’t Understand” is one of the more thoughtful I have seen on in recent years. It’s not interested in coming up with some supernatural answer to this question, but instead in how our curiosity can somehow rob us of what meaning our lives have. Here we meet a variety of characters whose mind and thoughts are broken as their present lives seem unfulfilling because of physical and emotional scars, and their futures all seem relentlessly bleak.

Molly Ryman stars as Violet Kubelick, a graduate student who is working on a thesis of what becomes of us after death. Over time she has emotionally detached from the world and those around her after surviving a failed suicide attempt and has since developed a pessimistic attitude about life and what it has to offer. She lives to avoid every customer who enters the bookstore she works at and freely embraces a life of drugs, alcohol and promiscuous sex as though she is daring death to take her away from this cruel world.

Things come to a head for Violet as she and her obsessively artistic roommates, bi-sexual musician Remy (Hugo Dillon) and hypersensitive artist Gabby (Melissa Hampton), face eviction from their home in Brooklyn and have to quickly come up with the money to save it. While this is happening, Violent comes to interview Sara (Grace Folsom), a girl with end stage cancer who approaches the end with a sardonic sense of humor, and she forms a friendship with lonely bartender Parker McNeil (Aaron Mathias) who is trapped by a tragic past that won’t leave him be. All these relationships bring about a much needed catharsis for everyone as they need to break free of what holds them back.