EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE

His father (Tom Hanks), who stimulates him intellectually by inventing all kinds of puzzles, is killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Soon afterwards, Oskar finds a key among his father’s belongings, hidden inside an envelope bearing the name Black. Convinced that it is part of a game that was never finished, he decides to investigate. Lying to his mother (Sandra Bullock), he sets off across New York searching for both the mysterious person and the lock the key might open. As he makes his way through the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island, he is accompanied by an old man who does not speak (Max von Sydow). Searching the city, Oskar meets lonely people, wounded and feeling much as he does, and creates an unusual map measured not only in numbers, but also in emotion and memory.

Released a decade after the attacks on the United States, and screened at the British Film Festival a quarter of a century later, Stephen Daldry’s EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE (2011), based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel and Eric Roth’s screenplay, tells the story of the trauma of 9/11 from the perspective of a child trying to rationalise the irrational and to approach an incomprehensible loss as if it were a puzzle that could be solved. Grief becomes an odyssey, while New York resembles a mosaic made up of the faces and experiences of residents overwhelmed by unimaginable sorrow. Not every key opens something. Sometimes it simply fits something that does not physically exist.

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Text: Rafał Glapiak