(reflection toward or behind the film Union County, directed by Adam Meeks

A documentary-esque retelling of events that happen for the first time in constant communities of earned and secondhand loneliness, that uses actors and non-actors alike, Union County, as freed by and held to the screen by director Adam Meeks, is a film of so much almost saying that it could teach silence something about being quiet. In it, aftermath has a future, and all involved do the work of presence required to make an entirety of something half remembered. I am from Ohio and see Ohio in this as a crack crawling across a window and hear Ohio in this as a dreamily fixable door. But addiction is its own place, and takes place anywhere. I am reminded of Ohio poet Darren C Demaree’s collection Two Towns Over in which every distance has a populace whose touch is fighting an infection. Distance as closure. Touch as an unknown neighbor. Though dependence is a trick that sickens magic to spell us into believing that light can walk, the performances across the board here are beside themselves in their own skin. Will Poulter not only inhabits but seems previously transformed, and finds a way to show us, without going overboard, the undergone. Noah Centineo is the anxious third heart of the film who disappears three times in ways that deny absence. Elise Kibler moves worriedly in a body that stills us into our own. Annette Deao, a non-actor who proves there are no non-actors when it comes to grace and sacrifice, makes of story an auto-nonfiction. And then there is Emily Meade, fully lived-in, far off, called to play the one note that the song of devastation missed. And the song is changed, and the body jerks, and the form is clothed.