We first meet Audrey Benac as an acolyte in the quiet temples of the past, a place where history settles like a fine, undisturbed dust. Played by Deragh Campbell, she is a graduate student moving through the hushed corridors of archives and libraries. Her purpose is a singular, focused beam in the dim light: to reconstruct the life of Kathleen Parlow.
Parlow was a violinist of some renown in the early 20th century, a virtuoso whose echo has now faded into near silence. For Audrey, the connection is threaded with personal history, a faint genealogical ghost; Parlow was her grandfather’s instructor. This fact provides a fragile, almost mythic, justification for her work, a reason to descend into the catacombs of another’s existence.
The research itself is a ritual of solitude, a communion with ephemera. We watch her handle aged paper with gloved hands and peer at faded photographs, each artifact a small stone retrieved from a forgotten riverbed. Her academic rigor feels like something more, a meticulously constructed shelter against an unnamed, formless dread. This is not the simple pursuit of knowledge. It is a profound preoccupation, a way of ordering the world that seems designed to hold a more chaotic, immediate reality at a distance.
A Concerto for the Void
Audrey’s intellectual fortress is built to withstand a siege from her own life, a life that demands an accounting she is unwilling to give. The encroaching realities are a dying mother and a relationship dissolving into the long silence of its end. Phone calls from the hospice arrive like transmissions from a foreign land, their pleas for presence and connection met with the static of evasion.
Her mother, a musician whose own ambitions were curtailed by the demands of life, imparts a sense of guilt that hangs in the air between them, a poison shared across the wires. This inheritance of disappointment is a weight Audrey cannot acknowledge, so she exchanges it for another. Her research becomes a desperate pilgrimage away from this scene of decay and responsibility. Her travels in Parlow’s footsteps are a flight from the self.
She carries her grandfather’s violin across continents, the instrument a physical manifestation of inherited sorrow and artistic pressure. It is a relic she holds as if its secrets, once unlocked, might solve the riddle of her own being. The quest culminates in the discovery and staging of a lost concerto written for Parlow, a magnificent act of historical resurrection.
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Yet the triumph is a troubling substitution of one life for another. She gives sound to a forgotten score because she cannot face the silence of her own impending losses, orchestrating a past victory to drown out the sound of present failure.
The Geometry of Solitude
Director Sofia Bohdanowicz constructs the film with a cool, deliberate precision that mirrors Audrey’s own intellectual defenses. Every frame is composed with a control that leaves no room for the messiness of spontaneous life. The widescreen cinematography by Nikolay Michaylov often places Audrey as a small figure in a vast, indifferent frame, rendering her physically and spiritually isolated in grand, empty rooms. This visual language is a geometry of solitude.
Bohdanowicz moves from the softer, artifactual feel of her earlier work to a crisp digital presentation that feels both thoughtful and unnervingly sterile, observing its subject with an almost clinical remoteness. The film’s narrative is elliptical, its dialogue often stilted and academic, a language designed to analyze emotion rather than express it.
This formal alienation is punctuated by surreal ruptures in reality, moments where Parlow’s ghost seems to bleed through the veil of research, a psychological projection given form. These fissures suggest the return of the repressed, where the historical subject becomes a manifestation of Audrey’s own artistic and personal anxieties.
Olivier Alary’s majestic score provides the rich emotionality that the film’s surface otherwise denies. The music speaks the grief and longing she cannot, acting as an externalized soul that fills the vacuum left by her suppression.
An Anatomy of Restraint
The entire structure is anchored by Deragh Campbell’s remarkable performance, a study in the immense effort of self-containment. Her Audrey is a quiet seismograph, registering internal tremors with the barest flicker of an eye or the tension held in her hands. Campbell, who also co-wrote the script, charts a careful map of a personality most at home with the dead.
Audrey’s fierce confidence among archival documents, where she holds a clear authority, dissolves into a withdrawn anxiety in the presence of the living. Campbell’s stillness is not passive; it is an active, draining exertion to keep the self from fracturing. The performance is a masterclass in restraint, which makes the rare moments her composure shatters so potent.
Listening to a century-old wax cylinder recording of Parlow, her face is a canvas of suppressed revelation. During the final performance of the resurrected concerto, her tears are not a release but a quiet confirmation of all that has been displaced. The film is a testament to her work, which communicates the painful truth of a person who has mastered the histories of others to avoid the terrifying task of authoring her own.
Measures for a Funeral is a Canadian drama film that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024 and was released in cinemas in 2025. The film is distributed by Vortex Media. Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz, it is an expansion of her 2018 short film Veslemøy’s Song.
Full Credits
Director: Sofia Bohdanowicz
Writers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Deragh Campbell
Producers and Executive Producers: Andreas Mendritzki, Aonan Yang, Priscilla Galvez
Cast: Deragh Campbell, María Dueñas, Melanie Scheiner, Mary-Margaret O’Hara, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Maxim Gaudette, Eve Duranceau, Eileen Davies
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Nikolay Michaylov
Editors: Pablo Alvarez-Mesa
Composer: Olivier Alary
The Review
Measures for a Funeral
Measures for a Funeral is less a narrative film and more a quiet, philosophical meditation on the architecture of absence. It's a demanding, sometimes remote experience that rewards patience with a profound look at how we use the ghosts of history to avoid the specter of our own lives. Through Sofia Bohdanowicz’s precise direction and Deragh Campbell’s hauntingly restrained performance, the film becomes a beautiful, melancholic study of a soul lost in the archives. It is a work of considerable intelligence and artistry.
PROS
- A masterful and deeply nuanced lead performance from Deragh Campbell.
- An intellectually rigorous exploration of complex themes like grief, memory, and artistic obsession.
- Stunning, deliberate cinematography that creates a powerful sense of isolation.
- Sofia Bohdanowicz’s precise and confident direction.
CONS
- The intentionally cold and distancing style may alienate some viewers.
- An elliptical narrative and academic dialogue can feel inaccessible.
- Its slow, meditative pace requires significant viewer patience.
