BENNY

A grieving widow refuses to see what her surrogate husband has become — until the day he tears her best friend apart, and even then, she won't let herself know.

Benny is a chamber piece about denial as an act of love and an act of ruin: a home that closes over its own grief, and the willed blindness that keeps it standing.

Months after she buries her husband, the widow is not living alone. Something has taken his side of the bed and the head of his table. She lays two places for dinner. She keeps his chair warm. Whatever it is, it lets her go on being a wife — and she has learned not to ask it anything.

She calls it Benny. It answers to the name. It moves through the house with an ease that should not be possible, and she has trained herself to look away in the seconds when that ease slips — when the warmth goes flat and something older shows through.

Her oldest friend sees it before she will. She comes by more and more, watching the widow cook for and confide in a presence she refuses to explain, and she starts asking the questions the widow has buried. The house closes a little tighter with each one.

It ends the way the widow always feared and never let herself picture: in daylight, in the room she guards most carefully, the thing called Benny turns on the friend who came to save her. What she does in that moment — what she allows herself to see — is the whole of the film.