All Things Cease to Appear

By tradition, I’ll start with the film adaptation — but this time I need to split it into two parts, because I watched the movie first, then discovered and read the book, and then rewatched the film. It was a completely different experience the second time.

Some things don’t change: the visuals, cast and performances are really nice, as is the setting. When I watched the movie for the first time, it didn’t seem as bad as its rating suggested. It has something of a ghost story in it, but also a psychological suspense element. I gave it 6.7/10 — not a bad movie, with a somewhat goofy ending, but the rest of it, especially the underlying meaning, seemed pretty good to me.

But after reading the book and rewatching the film, I was pretty furious. The adaptation suddenly looked so much worse — the creators did a really poor job bringing the story to screen, even though they already had everything they needed. I suspect a lot of it went to waste because it was made by Netflix, which is really sad given how great the book is. The movie is fine to watch if you haven’t read the book — if only to discover that it exists and go read it.

Now, to the book itself. The first 70+ pages are a bit hard to get through, because the story doesn’t start with the main characters and it can feel a little confusing. But after that it moves quickly and smoothly. It’s just something you have to push through.

The atmosphere is dark, heavy and at times even cruel in its content — and incredibly beautiful in its writing — as it tells the difficult story of a relationship between a man and a woman. Some parts may be hard to read due to the content, which includes not only emotional but also physical abuse.

This is a perfect story to illustrate what an abusive relationship actually looks like and how it can end for one of the people in it — unlike that unrealistic mess called It Ends With Us. I wish more people would find All Things Cease to Appear — it genuinely deserves far more attention and popularity than it has, and I’ll die on this hill.

There’s no mystery here: it’s very clear who did what and why — simply because he could. It’s a tragic story of a woman who didn’t want to believe her husband was a narcissistic psychopath, for a variety of reasons: patriarchal culture, unhealthy love, or perhaps dependency — financial, emotional, or otherwise.