Things We Lost in the Fire is a more or less well-made film that should appeal to most people, and has been well received by most critics (it currently has a Metascore of 87). While it is a film I was able to greatly appreciate on a technical level, despite a few performances, I hardly connected with it on a personal level. It may just be me, but I have a feeling most will feel the same way.

Focusing on the entirely over-done story of two drastically different people (Halle Berry as a grieving widow and Benicio Del Toro as her husband's drug-addled friend) brought together by a common sense of loss, Things We Lost in the Fire is not a plot-driven movie. This is a movie in which its characters do not bend to fit the plot, but rather, the plot bends to accommodate the characters. This is mostly a wise choice on director Susanne Bier's part as Del Toro, the heart of the film, is and always has been an outstanding actor. He's charged with most of the film's heavy lifting, and pulls it off beautifully. The rest of the cast, particularly Berry and David Duchovony as Berry's husband in flashback, just cannot match him, preventing the movie from ever becoming the emotionally wrenching story it has the potential to be. This essentially reduces the film to a two-person show between Del Toro and Bier's great, mostly hand-held cinematography. These strengths are more than capable of carrying the movie on, but there is nothing that made me want to go back and watch the movie more than the one time I did. There really isn't anything else to be said, good or bad, about Things We Lost in the Fire, it's one of those movies that just is.

The special features on Things We Lost in the Fire are, unsurprisingly for a low-profile release of this sort, very lacking. As I seem to be writing in nearly every review these days, the deleted scenes do nothing to add to the movie and were all wisely cut, and the sole featurette is unenlightening at best. Don't take the scarcity of special features as a slight against the movie, though. Even movies like No Country for Old Men don't get good ones.

Even though I only moderately enjoyed this flick, I believe Things We Lost in the Fire is a movie most people will truly love if they give it the chance. Bier's direction is interesting enough and Del Toro's performance is powerful enough to make it worth a viewing. While most of the other performances are quite weak, it's not too difficult to look past them. Things We Lost in the Fire may not be perfect, but it's certainly not terrible either. With low enough expectations, it can make for a very pleasant rental, and, if you're in the right mood, a great movie.