“Your wife just died and you are writing a letter to a vending machine company because it didn’t give you the M&Ms you paid for”

Demolition stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a successful investor banker who is seen in car driven by his wife, suddenly hit by a car to wake up in the hospital chair with not even a scratch to his body. The story revolves around Davis played by Jake, starting to experience the essence of things in life after the tragedy trying to find a way to find out why he is not able to feel pain or sadness for his wife’s death.

A Fox Searchlight Film, Demolition was released in 2015 and earned about 4.2 million USD from the box office. Jake Gyllenhaal is known for doing silent but deep movies, Demolition is one of them. The movie also stars Naomi Watts as Karen, Chris Cooper as Phil, Judah Lewis as Chris and Heather Lind as Julia.

So lets sort out the characters – so Julia is Davis’ wife who dies, Phil is Julia’s dad, Karen is the customer service head of the vending machine company and Chris is her 15 years old son. While Davis keeps on writing letters to the company, Phil and others at the company start to question his mental health. After 4 letters Karen calls Davis finally to ask if he is alright and needed some help.

Karen is a sort of single mother as she has her boyfriend who is the head of the vending machine company. It’s a really nice story how Davis and Chris become comfortable with each other, and share their mental thoughts together. Karen loves to understand the way Davis portrays the world to her by his words and himself also explores the things he didn’t realise earlier. Meanwhile Phil who wants to invest the insurance money of her daughter for a good cause is hampered by Davis’ behaviour as he just doesn’t find him sad for the loss but strange.

The movie feels a little silent although it consists of classis tunes in the background – La Boheme being one them. For a hyped movie watcher, you might get bored finding the direction of the story. The director has produced the movie in a real-life mode as we find Davis recognize the life he has lived through and not even observing the feelings that went past him – the pain, the sorrow, the love- Jake Gyllenhaal does produce a great character act in the story.

IMDB rates the movie at 7 while the Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 53%. I won’t recommend it as a must watch but for a change it can be rated as 6/10 due to the weakness in story direction to grip the viewer in.