Is there ever a point at which grief gets easier? 16-year-old Sophie Jones (Jessica Barr) is going through it. Her mother has recently died. She feels tangible distance from her younger sister Lucy (Charlie Jackson) and their father Aaron (Dave Roberts). Every day feels like a struggle that just bleeds into another, and another, and another. Nothing feels right—and that unease, when coupled with Sophie’s adolescent sexual awakening, makes for a complicated mix that “Sophie Jones” tracks with rawness, poignancy, and slightly too much vaguery.Sophie Jones 2021 Full Movie Download.
The film is a family affair, directed by Jessie Barr and written by Jessie and her cousin Jessica, who also stars in “Sophie Jones” as its titular teenager. The Barrs drew from their own personal experiences as adolescents who each lost a parent to cancer, and the result is that “Sophie Jones” feels deeply authentic in its understanding of grief. There are no grand blowouts here, no massively emoting moments. Instead, “Sophie Jones” rejects linear storytelling to operate more as a series of vignettes, spread out over two or so years, which follow Sophie as she struggles to mourn her mother, develop her own personality, and explore her sexual identity. We jump forward sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, but the focus is always two-pronged: the inner sadness Sophie carries that she rarely shares with anyone else, and the outer sexual confidence—tiptoeing into aggression—that she displays as she jumps from guy to guy.
On the one hand, this centers Jessica Barr’s organic, naturalistic performance, allowing the actress space to work out the myriad oppositional complexities related to mourning and desire. When we meet Sophie, she’s opening the bag of her mother’s ashes, sifting through them with her fingers, and putting some in her mouth (a tic she’ll use as a defensive mechanism throughout the film, also with blood). Is it macabre that in the next scene, she’s swiping on some lipgloss and sucking on a lollipop while proposing a hookup arrangement with classmate Kevin (Skyler Verity)? Maybe! But this sort of vacillation is Sophie’s new normal.