When You Finish Saving the World review

When You Finish Saving the World stars Julieanne Moore as Evelyn. She’s a very literal woman who appears to be on the autism spectrum. Her son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is completely disconnected from her.

Evelyn in When You Finish Saving the World is the director of a women’s shelter. She does good work but is so awkward in conversations that her attempts at small talk make one of her employees think she’s firing her.

At home, son Ziggy had a following for his live stream performances of his original songs. The name Ziggy was totally fanciful and not at all something Evelyn would have chosen for her child – but there it is. Evelyn’s husband (Jay O. Sanders) was just around, not much of a presence.

Everything about the family was strange and off the mark. Both Evelyn and Ziggy were self-obsessed and prone to unhealthy relationship with the people around them.

Evelyn formed a strange attachment to a young man named Kyle (Billy Bryk) who came into the shelter with his mother. He wanted to be an auto mechanic but Evelyn was determined to get him into college and behaved very unprofessionally with him.

Ziggy had a crush on Lila (Alisha Boe), a politically astute classmate. He took one of her protest poems about the Marshall Islands and made it into a song. He thought she’d love him for it. She was appalled that he performed it on his live stream and made money from it.

It took Evelyn and Ziggy getting slapped in the face by their unwelcome obsessions with the wrong people for them to wake up a bit and look at each other.

When You Finish Saving the World was written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. I’ve always felt an angsty, neurotic kind of vibe from Jesse Eisenberg. The characters he created here seem to be a reflection of that. I could see what Eisenberg was trying to do with this mother/son story, but it was not perfectly executed. It could have been a lot better than it was with a few more details and some heartfelt insight. The ending was starting to get close to something but it stopped too soon. However, I rated it higher that a lot of critics – possibly because I think Julieanne Moore is worth watching.

The film is streaming on Prime Video.