Better Days, an oddball Canadian indie about grief

Better Days is an odd little dark comedy about a woman in the midst of grieving over her husband’s death. Sonja Smits plays Kate, the widow, who grows on you over time until you’re really rooting for her to figure it out.

Better Days has a small cast, few sets, and a low budget look. The main character, Kate, narrates her own story. It’s not done as a voice over, however. As she describes what she went through she talks directly to the camera. She sits in front of a yellow wall in a plain white blouse and chats you through her story.

We often hear the folk wisdom that everyone grieves in their own way. This is a portrait of one way it was done by one woman.

Kate’s children are Jason (Gregory Ambrose Calderone) and Nisha (Kerrin Cochrane). Nisha is married to Chandni (Sugenja Sri). The two children have often inappropriate ideas about what they need to do for their mom and what she needs to do to be able to move on.

Kate’s husband loved Halloween. They have costumes from every year of their marriage in the closet. She sometimes wears the costumes, sometimes talks to the ones her husband wore.

She starts drinking. She wasn’t a drinker before but now she’s slugging down vodka straight from the bottle. Dylan (Luke Atteledon-Francis), the young man who delivers big sacks of vodka to her house, brings around a couple of his friends.

Kate gives them costumes to play around in. She smokes weed with them and joins their slacker teen conversations. Somehow they connect and help her cope. Her two children think Kate is losing her mind hanging out with teenagers, and she is a bit. But she’s also real with them, which is can’t always be with other people.

If you find her children inappropriate, Kate’s friend Jenna (Alix Sideris) is the queen of inappropriate. She a the caricature of a terrible friend at a moment of grief. Kate attempts suicide and takes a huge pile of pills. She falls flat on her face and passes out, but the annoying Jenna is there to save her. Now if someone could just save Jenna from Jenna.

After that, Kate tries to pull herself together. She goes back to work. She lays off the vodka. She dates a guy named Ralph (Dean Armstrong). It’s not until Kate seizes the idea that she has to figure out who she is, alone, that her real healing begins.

Sonja Smits is a talented actor. She made Kate poignant and real. Alix Sideris was very good at being terrible.

The film was written and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin. She has a unique style with a story and a quick wit as a writer. For a film that looks like it was made with zero budget, this one turned out fairly well.

I found Better Days well hidden in Amazon Prime’s library. It’s also on Plex and Tubi. If you’re thinking about giving it a try, you might enjoy checking out the trailer.