Somewhere towards the end of I Am Easy To Find, we are presented with a stark image, accompanied by the following words:

“She wondered how she became this person, not others”

It is a deeply complex question, and one that isn’t offered any answer, or at least not one that can be readily indicated. There are very few qualities that everyone shares, but a concept that has united philosophers, theologians, artists and common folk alike for millennia is that of existence and the core of what existence actually entails. What is the meaning of life, and what does it mean to be human? Obviously, life’s biggest questions are perpetually asked because there are no answers, no way to resolve these philosophical quandaries without launching oneself into an existential crisis when we realize that asking such a question is chasing after an impossible result. Various individuals throughout history have offered their own interpretation of what our collective raison d’etre actually is, and while some have been very convincing, the truth is that no one living knows exactly what it means to be human, or precisely what our purpose is, if we even have a purpose to begin with. One of the most recent forays into this line of philosophical inquiry comes on behalf of Mike Mills, who has made I Am Easy To Find in what appears to be an attempt to answer this age-old conundrum. Make no mistake, despite the fact that this is a short film made in collaboration with the indie rock band The National doesn’t mean it is anything less than an impactful masterpiece, a hidden gem of a film that is not merely a promotional piece made to accompany an album, but a complex, nuanced and brilliant work that stands as something extremely special. With a work that is being referred to as a visual album, Mills might have actually provided us with the most succinct and coherent answer to the questions of existence that have been posed for centuries, and he does it all in less than twenty-five minutes.

I Am Easy To Find follows the life of an individual (Alicia Vikander) from her birth to her death – and the audience is privy to nearly every aspect of her life as Mills takes us on a beautiful and poetic journey through her entire life, as we watch her grow up and grow old, eventually finding herself in the same position as those who came before her, and realizing that those who come after her will experience essentially the same life as her, albeit each with its own idiosyncrasies. If there was ever a work that focused on the concept of the circle of life, it certainly is I Am Easy To Find, and in a series of moments, Mills presents us with every aspect of this individual’s life – from important events that impact her life and define her future, to the banal and the mundane, the aspects of life that are perhaps not that exciting (and thus rarely even remembered) or just part of the human routine – we all grow up, and we all grow old. There is nothing extraordinary about the natural progression of life. Yet, through the extraordinary attention Mills pays to blending these occurrences into a short but impactful manifesto on existence allows us to view life not merely as being a singular experience, but rather a continuous stream of moments, composed of happiness and sadness, spontaneity and banality, ease and fear.

The circularity presented in I Am Easy To Find is what makes it such a compelling experience, and a wonderful experiment of a film. It is the antithesis of this grandiose method of telling a cradle-to-grave story, whereby the subject is presented as someone who is larger-than-life and deserves more attention for the life they led based only on their defining traits that set them apart from their fellow human. I Am Easy To Find is an unconventional biographical film, because not only does it quite literally chronicle the entire life of someone, its subject is just an ordinary woman. The title of the film (and the album that accompanies it) is ambigious at first, but when you realize the underlying message, “I am easy to find”, it becomes a statement to the resonance of this film and its subject, who is easy to find because she is the embodiment of the regular person – we can find her simply be reflecting on ourselves, because she represents the average person. There is nothing special about her – she isn’t even given a name in the film, referred to only as “she” and “her”. Despite being unremarkable, the character is made to be so captivating through the attention paid to portraying her life in a way that is never grandiose, but rather intimate and moving. This character is someone who is just another person, going through life and surviving harsh realities the best way she knows how. Her life is not punctuated by anything particularly remarkable – like we have all doubtlessly experienced, people weave in and out of our lives, we gain friends and we lose loved ones, we cry and we laugh, we feel relief and we experience trauma. Its best defined by another quote that appears sporadically throughout the film: “she felt big, small, at ease, scared” – this isn’t a contradiction, this is life.

Alicia Vikander takes on the role of the unnamed protagonist and essentially makes I Am Easy To Find a one-woman show, portraying the character from infancy to old age. Even at the outset, the approach this film takes in having one actress portray the same character over roughly eight decades without changing anything other than the wardrobe she wears at different parts of her life is experimental and unique and works out swimmingly, as Vikander is clearly up to the task. A deeper reading of this film can perhaps evoke the idea that the reason she doesn’t age but those around her do is because she is a physical embodiment of the soul – our bodies are temporary and age, but our souls remain the same eternally. Despite looking the same throughout, Vikander conveys the character’s progressing age through the way she carries herself, and how she emotes throughout the piece. This isn’t even mentioning how the actress says only a few words throughout, and rather allows the intricate text narration tell the story alongside her simple but affecting performance. Vikander demonstrates a great physicality in I Am Easy To Find, and her expressivity throughout this film is astonishing – she says so much without saying anything at all, which is an acting technique that has seemingly been lost as time has gone on. Her ability to emote and handle the panoply of experiences this character goes through without ever appearing inauthentic is a great achievement, as his her approach to playing this character at every age. Even when portraying her as an infant, Vikander never falls into the trap of being artificial or crafting a caricature. It takes a special kind of actor to give such a captivating performance, and Vikander is quite simply breathtaking in this film. I have never been against Vikander as an actress, but this was the first time I was truly blown away by her, with the simplicity of her performance demonstrating a new maturity to her style, and suggests that she is a lot more capable than the projects she has been appearing in recently since her major breakthrough and that with the right decisions, she could make some fascinating career moves, both within the arthouse and in the mainstream.

I Am Easy To Find is a profoundly human film, but that shouldn’t be a surprise considering it was written and directed by Mike Mills, who may have only made three feature films, but each one of them was a steadfast masterpiece that showed different sides of the human condition and explored the intricate minutiae of existence with revelatory brilliance – whether it be the quaint familial comedy of Thumbsucker, the approach to identity in Beginners or the beautiful ode to motherhood contained with 20th Century Women, Mills is a master at extracting extraordinary pulchritude from the most simple and delicate of concepts, as well as working closely with his actors to ensure they understand the vision and can interpret it with the intricacy it deserves. I Am Easy To Find may be a shorter effort from him in terms of a coherent film, but it is by no means a lesser effort. Every element of his creativity flows freely through this film, and there seem to be few artists more suited for Mills’ unique sense of existential ennui than The National, and in collaborating, both artists manage to convey something far deeper and much more profound than expected. The gorgeously nihilistic crooning of Matt Berninger on some incredibly moving songs compliments the stark imagery of Mills’ imagination and captured with intense sensitivity by the director of photography Daniel Voldheim, who translates the beauty of the message contained within the story, and crafts it into nothing short of pure visual poetry.

What makes I Am Easy To Find such an extraordinary work is that it is an anomaly – a film of this length, running at twenty-five minutes, should arguably (by its very definition), be brief. There have been some great short films, and many of them manage to package a large amount into their running times. Yet, very few have ever had the audacity to try and compress the entirety of human existence into a single piece that runs for less than half an hour, or at least very few have ever done this successfully. The key to what makes I Am Easy To Find so powerful is that it is simple. It presents life through the eyes of a single person, and through her existence, we see our own reflected back at us. We might not all experience the same events, but the same emotions are felt by us all throughout our lives – happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger and despair. I Am Easy To Find is composed as a series of moments, none of them lasting more than a few seconds. It is almost entirely without dialogue, the story mainly being told through the visuals and captioned sentences that don’t always tell the story, but rather imply certain concepts that the audience uses to create a more complete whole. I Am Easy To Find in its simplest form is nothing more than just a dedicated snapshot of life, a tapestry of experiences and moments that all come together to form something that is beautiful and traumatizing, joyful and tragic, simple and contradictory – the only thing that life isn’t is predictable.

Mike Mills and The National don’t seem to have any resolution to the oft-pondered question of the meaning of life. Yet, they seem to offer an answer of sorts. As the quote used at the beginning of this review says, one of the key scenes in this film shows our protagonist, old and alone, looking back and wondering “how she became this person, not others” – and the answer comes in the realization that everything leading up to that moment was not the result of a choice, but the product of fate. We are all destined to follow in the same circle of life – we are taught and then go on to teach, we are loved and we go on to love, we are born and then go on to die. We can try and deviate from the norm and even believe ourselves to have free will (and we do, to a point), but we will always end up facing the same preordained fate that befell those who came before us, and those who will come after us. Why is the protagonist “easy to find”? Is it because she is an ordinary person, or because she represents humanity as a whole, the embodiment of the joyful highs and the tragic lows that inflict our species? It may sound nihilistic, but the beauty of I Am Easy To Find comes in the realization that we are too concerned with asking life’s biggest questions when the answer is right in front of us – what does it mean to be human? Quite simply, it means to experience life in all its wonder and despair, and that’s something we all know a little too well.