Review of Above Us Only Sky (2011)
Seen in 2026.
Around the 20-minute mark, Martha is informed that her husband has committed suicide. She then learns that almost everything he told her about his professional life was untrue, which is probably why he killed himself. Halfway through the movie, Martha abandons that investigation and tries to find a replacement, whom she tells nothing.
Though Martha’s consistent goal is the city of Marseille, there is an off-hand reference to Australia. I take this to be an allusion to Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989). This film is in a similar vein, but less artsy. If Martha had simply continued her investigation uninterrupted, Above Us Only Sky could have been a conventional thriller-drama hybrid, albeit with a rude and oblivious protagonist.
It is funny, from an analytical perspective, that the audience never really learns what the first husband was doing, aside from sleeping with Martha’s friend Trixie, but the deeper joke is that Martha turns out to be even more abnormal than her husband. It’s a nice metafictional turn to maintain focus on her instead of ever solving the mystery. That turn does not carry the movie, but I sense a pleasant media-critical point to it.