You ever walk into an art gallery and wonder if the janitor just left a pile of garbage in the middle of the floor? That’s Showing Up, the cinematic version of someone dumping papier-mâché sadness on your shoe and then asking you to contemplate its existential weight. Directed by Kelly Reichardt, this is yet another entry in her ever-expanding universe of quiet people having quiet breakdowns under quiet skies.
Showing Up is a film that simmers, but never cooks. It boils water for tea and then forgets to add the bag. It’s about an artist trying to finish a sculpture while being mildly inconvenienced by life, and if that sentence just made you yawn involuntarily, congrats—you’ve experienced the full emotional arc of this movie.
🎨 The “Plot”: A Clay Chicken and Some Passive-Aggression
Lizzy (Michelle Williams, doing her best “resentful art ghost” impression) is a Portland sculptor with all the warmth of a tax form. She works at an art school, lives in a cramped house with a broken water heater, and spends most of the film squinting at ceramic torsos like they insulted her mother.
She’s trying to prepare for a gallery show, but her daily life is full of distractions—her passive-aggressively vibrant landlord Jo (Hong Chau), a pigeon with a busted wing, and a family that seems to communicate entirely in condescending sighs.
That’s it. That’s the plot. She makes sculptures. Someone else is more successful. A pigeon is metaphorically and literally broken. At one point someone eats a muffin. There’s no dramatic outburst, no climactic confrontation, not even a satisfying kiln explosion. It’s just one long, awkward vibe punctuated by crusty clay and muted despair.
😐 Characters: Emotionally Constipated Portlandians
Michelle Williams plays Lizzy like she’s been trapped inside a Sadness Simulator 3000. Every scene finds her glaring at something—her clay, her boss, her mom, the sky—as if willing it to disappear. It’s a performance so stripped of affect, it could be used as a how-to video for avoiding human connection.
Hong Chau is the exact opposite: Jo is confident, energetic, artistically successful, and exactly the kind of person Lizzy seems to hate on principle. She’s the type of person who’d rescue a bird and then brag about it for three days while you struggle to unclog your sink alone. In any other movie, she’d be the comic relief. In Showing Up, she’s just another source of subtle existential dread.
The rest of the characters shuffle in and out like extras in a Wes Anderson parody that forgot to be whimsical. Lizzy’s coworkers offer quiet shrugs. Her family is a grab bag of neglected neurotics. The dog doesn’t bark. The pigeon’s the most expressive creature in the movie.
🧱 Art as Burden, Not Joy
In theory, Showing Up is a film about the artistic process—the struggle to create, the balance between life and expression, the emotional labor of crafting something meaningful. But in practice, it’s a 108-minute reminder that most artists are barely functioning humans who really need to eat a vegetable and go outside.
Lizzy doesn’t enjoy her art. No one in this movie seems to enjoy anything. They endure. There are long scenes of sculpting, glazing, and talking about firing schedules like it’s a funeral for excitement. The only thing that gets fired is your will to keep watching.
Even the art show at the end—this supposed culmination of Lizzy’s internal journey—feels less like triumph and more like a really awkward office potluck where someone brought hummus and no one has a plate.
📷 Cinematography: Portland Gloomcore
Reichardt’s visuals are intentionally unglamorous. The camera lingers on drab interiors, pale natural light, and people walking slowly through half-dead gardens. The color palette is 90% taupe, 10% pigeon.
To her credit, it’s all very authentic. You feel like you’re in Portland, probably wearing fleece and wondering if the kombucha place is open. But authenticity does not equal excitement. There are only so many lovingly lit shots of clay blobs before you start rooting for a sudden flood or a rogue bear attack.
💀 Pacing: A Meditative Crawl Toward Nowhere
Reichardt’s movies are never known for pace, but Showing Up takes slow-burn to a whole new level. It’s not just slow—it’s anti-velocity. Scenes stretch on for minutes longer than necessary. Conversations trail off like a dying dial tone. At one point, someone looks at a sculpture for a full 30 seconds in total silence, and I swear I felt my soul trying to escape my body through my kneecaps.
🕊️ The Pigeon: Yes, We Have to Talk About It
Let’s not forget the emotional lynchpin of this whole film: the injured pigeon. Found by Jo, forced upon Lizzy, it becomes a metaphor for—wait, I’m sorry, it’s a pigeon. You want me to emotionally invest in a pigeon? I’ve seen pigeons eat their own vomit. They’re rats with feathers.
And yet, in this movie, the pigeon gets more character development than most of the humans. It gets a bath, a recovery arc, and possibly more screen time than Lizzy’s brother. By the end, I half-expected the bird to fly into the gallery and deliver a TED Talk on emotional resilience.
🧠 Themes: The Pain of Creation, and Also Muffins
Reichardt is clearly wrestling with something real here: the way art can be isolating, the way women are often overlooked in creative fields, and how emotional labor gets dumped on the least expressive people. But her delivery system is so stiflingly quiet, so dry, that the message collapses under its own minimalist weight.
It’s like being handed a profound poem… typed in 6-point font… in invisible ink… and then told to interpret it while standing in the rain.
🔚 Final Verdict: “Showing Up”… for What, Exactly?
Showing Up is a movie about artists that forgets to entertain, inspire, or even provoke. It’s a drab, grim, gray dribble of a film that offers no resolution, no catharsis, and no joy—just a slow drip of mildly unpleasant interactions and half-glazed stares.
If your idea of a thrilling climax is a ceramic foot being gently admired under flickering gallery lights, by all means, this is your jam. For everyone else, it’s a cinematic endurance test.
TL;DR
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Plot: Woman sculpts clay, glares at people, feeds a pigeon
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Characters: Emotionally suppressed art school introverts
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Pacing: Glacial, if the glacier was also depressed
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Themes: Art is suffering, pigeons matter more than you
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Color Palette: Dusty oatmeal with a splash of bird poop
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 semi-functional kilns
If you’ve ever wanted to feel like the world is slowly ending in a co-op art studio, Showing Up will cradle you gently in its beige, pigeon-feathered arms. The rest of us will be watching literally anything else—even Bob Ross reruns feel like Die Hard compared to this.
