There’s this part in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close where the kid just blurted his story out loud to an old man who’s a stranger for him. I find it incredibly heart wrenching. It’s a lot easier to tell the truth to strangers because we don’t care what they think.
And the rendezvous later in the film is one of the strongest between two strangers I’ve ever known — in film.
The comfort we find in strangers is sometimes all we need.
Sometimes you watch something so powerful and personal, like Extremely Close, but then you watch stuff like Sherlock, where Mycroft set up a fake flight to save passengers from a terrorist act, but also to fool terrorists that their plan has succeeded.
You’ll be confused but then you’ll feel at ease because you don’t have to choose one another. It’s only film. You can always change your mind.