Signs of Life Film Review: Silent Grief

Signs of Life, from writer and director John Millson, is a stunning examination of the nature of grief and the ways that kindness can offer healing.

Anne (Sarah-Jane Potts) has endured some loss so significant that it has left her mute. She is traveling on a shoestring budget. She carries with her only a small, red suitcase and an urn filled with ashes that she seems unable to scatter. After being run out of the room she is staying in by a group of loud, threatening neighbors, she is desperate to find somewhere to stay. She meets Joyce (Sharon Duce), a boisterous, jovial woman who engages with her briefly, but flits off before Anne is able to ask her for help.

We have seen Bill (David Ganly) several times before he and Anne have a real conversation. He offers to pay for her sandwich when she is in line at the airport coffee shop. She sees him out for a jog each morning. In their first meaningful interaction, he blunders into her quiet reverie with massive leg cramps. As they converse, he opens up that he is on this holiday alone after his ex-wife changed plans at the last minute, keeping his children from attending with him. He plans to leave and offers her his villa. When Anne shows up before he has left, she encourages him to stay.

There were moments in the film when Millson could have amplified the tension by creating a scenario that would put Anne in danger from Bill, but that’s not what Signs of Life is interested in. Yes, there are moments of conflict, but they are borne of misunderstanding and of the way that these two characters manage their pain. Where Anne’s grief has silenced her, Bill’s grief at the time lost with his children is expressed through near constant apologies and sometimes thoughtless rants about his experience. What could be a story about predatory behavior is instead about the ways that heartache manifests. 

The performances from Potts and Ganly are both spectacular. Potts has a beautifully expressive face, and it’s easy to forget that she has almost no lines in the entire film. We rarely even see what she has written in her notebook to communicate with people, but we understand what she is saying simply by watching her emotions play out. While it may seem that Ganly has an easier time, given his ability to speak throughout the film, he manages to match Potts in her emotive prowess. The two can provide us with this pair of people who are essentially strangers, but find a sense of belonging to one another in their sorrow.

Visually, this movie is gorgeous. Millson knows when to allow a camera to linger on a character to truly capture what they’re feeling. There is real wisdom on display here, showing an intuitive sense of when to get uncomfortably close and when to have a wide shot that can almost go unnoticed because of how seamless it is. His direction, coupled with Elliot Millson’s cinematography and the gentle and soulful score by Anne Dudley, makes Signs of Life a beautiful movie to watch. Even though we are afforded few details about Anne’s loss, we still feel as though we understand her pain. 

Finding words to speak or to write is rarely difficult for me. I have been writing publicly in some capacity for more than twenty years. But following a season of extreme loss, including the death of my mother, the stillbirth of my son, a painful divorce, and a number of other small and large changes, the words dried up. My words were there, but I felt like I couldn’t get them out. There could be a sense that the moment Signs of Life lives up to its title is when Anne speaks for the first time, but as someone who has been silenced by grief for a season, the true sign is that she keeps going, even silently.

Signs of Life will be released in select UK cinemas on 8 September, 2025.