I really loved this movie. A whole lot. Wow. The story really resonated with me.The movie follows the connections shared by Davis with Karen, and Davis with Karen's son Chris, as well as other characters, as they take apart their own lives, demolishing their pain, and building a new life together. We get a glimpse into the pain experienced by people that can be healed through destroying the past, rebuilding for the future, and connecting with others.Every character is multi-dimensional, experiencing inner turmoil, struggling in their own ways. Even the deceased character (no spoiler, but it's pretty obvious who unless you know nothing about the movie) is multi dimensional and we learn about her own struggles.Physical pain vs emotional pain, and physical possessions vs personal connections are large themes of the movie. The ability to feel feelings, to control them, and the joy that comes once you feel free to release them. Sometimes you need to destroy and take everything apart to fix it.There are moments of raw human emotion and vulnerability, laughter, regret and grief, childlike connection, painful isolation and loneliness, forgiveness and sorrow. It's truly an astounding experience. I laughed and cried and felt this movie was written about my own life.I found it breathtaking seeing pain and comfort in this way. How two people who are complete strangers can have an immediate connection, one that is very unique and deeper compared to relationships characters spent years building. This story may not be for everyone, but I found it shockingly compelling, poignant, and relatable.

It's difficult to fully understand what writer Bryan Sipe and director/co-producer Jean-Marc Vallee we thinking when they fashioned this interesting but ultimately unsatisfying movie. As an examination of grief and the different ways we humans react to it – it might have been effective if it didn't continually stray into so many over the top messy situations. There are just too many foolish plot devices that lead this so-called study into the unbelievable. Firstly, we have to try to understand our lead becoming disenfranchised with his life after the death of his young wife in an auto accident – but it's difficult to sympathize - as it was made rather clear he tended to be this way before the fatal accident. In fact, it looked seriously like his marriage was headed for divorce because of his apparent detachments. Things quickly unravel further when he begins to demolish household items in his very pleasant modern house but, gets worse when this behaviour also carries over to items in the homes of those who reach out to him. Far too many overly strange occurrences drag this story off the rails into pretty much of a dishevelled mess. One particularly unpleasant sequence has him taking the foul-mouthed, troubled, and sexually 'confused' 15yr old son of a newly acquired female acquaintance to his home, then proceeds to smash the entire premises to pieces with demolishing sledgehammers – encouraging the lad to join in the carnage as if it were some 'fun' task. This, being just one of several irresponsible acts that either involves destruction or encouraging the young lad to shoot at him with a handgun - while he wears a bullet proof vest! In their attempts to be topical, controversial, or 'off-the-wall' these movie makers tend to sabotage their own work – assuring it becoming the failure it certainly was. Only redeeming features are some OK performances, photography, and use of a few good song selections.Those who look for movies that deliberately set out to "rock the boat" will think this pretty good – but, with a box office return of around $4million out of a $10million budget - it would seem most found it unsettling or ultimately boring. Pity, with a little more controlled treatment it may have been far more involving.

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. Opens with a car crash that takes the life of Jake Gyllenhaal's character's wife. From there this movie swung in a different direction than I thought. For me it seems to be about how someone deals with grief. Everyone around his character wants/expects him to be acting in a certain way. His wife's death has changed his outlook on life and those around him eventually become less comfortable with his behaviour. I really enjoyed Jake's performance. His character is weird (Not Nightcrawler weird), funny, angry and ultimately just figuring out how to grieve. For a movie I was expecting to lean into the sentimentality it played out in a different way that I feel is a bit more true to real life. It didn't win him any awards but I think the acting in this places it as one of the better movies Jake has done.

Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a successful investment banker working for his father-in-law's firm. Tragedy strikes for Davis when his wife Julia (Heather Lind) is killed in a car accident. Shortly after his wife is pronounced dead, Davis has a problem with a vending machine and writes several letters of complaint to the vending machine company, which leads to Davis striking up a friendship with Karen (Naomi Watts) a customer service representative at the vending machine company who is touched by the content of his letters. Davis, with the help of Karen, goes on a voyage of self-discovery after the death of his wife, but the unconventional methods he employs to deal with his wife's death don't meet with approval for those closest to him.Presumably, Demolition is intended as a character study and I can see that an interesting film could have been made out of the character of Davis - he's seemingly an emotionally-retarded man incapable of showing emotion or grief in the conventional sense of the word. In the opening segments of the film, his wife criticises him for not really paying attention, but later in the film we can see that he is actually observant and fairly regimental when going about his daily routine. To me though, it seemed that he only focuses his attention on what is important to him and isn't really interested in what is important to anyone else. The film suggests (as far as I could gather) that there may have been psychological issues with Davis - him being unable to emote or show concern over his wife's death and I really wish that these psychological issues would have had more bearing on the story.Davis' unconventional method of dealing with his wife's death is interesting in its early stages; his desire to open everything up and see how it works may have been a metaphor about his own existence - essentially stripping everything away about himself and rebuilding himself possibly as a better person. As things progress, Davis gets worse and worse and the moment he pays a group of builders to help them knock a house down is the point where we start to learn that Davis is deeply troubled. This aspect of the story is quite interesting and fun to watch (for a while), but once we get to this point there isn't really any further development of Gyllenhaal's character and at this point in the film it goes from being fun and interesting to being tiresome and repetitive.As well as Davis' own life struggle the film has other threads such as Karen's marital problems and her son Chris and his struggle with his sexuality. These themes are littered throughout the film and are covered in dribs and drabs, but never really to an extent that you're able to become emotionally invested in these themes or in the characters. Admittedly, the former thread isn't that interesting, but the latter theme is and perhaps could have been expanded further. I think this is part of the problem with this film in that it has lots of ideas and themes, but at 98 minutes long it perhaps doesn't have the running time to develop all of its ideas and as a result it comes across as being a bit muddled and cluttered at times.Still the acting is pretty good and it is interesting in its early stages and despite some of its problems it never falls into the realms of being unwatchable, but at the same time it's never as interesting as it could have been and when the film ended I felt as though I knew as much about Davis at the end as I did at the start. In my book, Demolition is something of a failure, but it is, at least at times, a moderately interesting failure.