Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Evelyn’ On Netflix, A Documentary About Three Siblings Hiking Across The UK To Help Them Deal With Their Brother’s Suicide (2024)

Suicide and mental illness have touched most of our lives. If we haven’t lost someone to suicide ourselves, we know someone who has. It’s such a traumatic event, that the people left behind sometimes can’t talk about it, bewildered by why their loved one decided to end their lives. Orlando von Einsiedel has been so closed off about his brother Evelyn’s suicide in 2004, he decided to film a long hike with his brother, sister, parents, and friends where people start to open up about Evelyn’s life, the good and the bad.

EVELYN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel (Virginia, The White Helmets) has gone to global hotspots and trouble zones to make his films; he’s seen plenty of deaths and tragedies. But a tragedy that happened in his own life is so traumatic that neither he nor his siblings have talked about it for 13 years. That was the suicide of Orlando’s brother Evelyn (pronounced EVE-lynn) in 2004. We start the film with a shot of Orlando opening a note to his father from the medical examiner for the first time ever; he’s so overwhelmed emotionally that he can barely bring himself to read what turns out to be his brother’s suicide note.

What Orlando, his brother Robin and his sister Gwennie decide to do in order to pay tribute to Evelyn is to do what he used to love to do: hike across his favorite spots in the UK. They start in a national park in the Scottish Highlands and hike across for days, talking to each other for the first time about where they were when they heard their brother killed himself, the feelings they went through in the months and years that followed, and an exploration about why they shut those feelings off over the past 13 years.

Along the way, they hike with their mother Johanna Thornycroft, who more or less raised the four of them by herself after their father moved back to Germany. She saw Evelyn’s deterioration from a mostly happy kid to one who got diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly after graduating college. She feels more could have been done by her, by the healthcare system, and she continually wonders what would have happened if she intervened earlier.

Then the siblings meet their father, Andreas, and stepmother, Harriet. Andreas always felt closest to Evelyn, and it shows in how he self-centeredly overthinks his life and death while simultaneously making his other three kids, especially Gwennie, feel like crap. There’s lots of tension, including an outburst by Andreas in a restaurant, but at some point, they come to some sort of understanding. Then they hike with Evelyn’s best friends: Jack Binnie, who had to deal with his father’s suicide before dealing with Evelyn’s, and Leon Oldstrong, who encourages Orlando to stop directing and start talking about Evelyn and how he feels about the suicide.

For the most part, though, the siblings sort through their own feelings, and it feels that Gwennie wears her feelings on her sleeve, breaking down 2/3 of the way into the trip because, despite all the talking, she feels worse, not better.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There aren’t many movies likeEvelyn.Orlando von Einsiedel essentially combines a frank form of therapy with the gorgeous scenery of the mountains, islands and fields where the family hikes. The most analogous film we can think of isWild, based on Cheryl Strayed’s book. But that was scripted, and didn’t involve a whole family hiking.

Performance Worth Watching: This is also unusual, but the performance of DP Franklin Dow, who created a backpack-style camera rig that allowed him to shoot while walking forward, and be unobtrusive enough so the conversation flowed naturally, needs to be recognized. Some of the shots of everyone walking look a little dreamy, with the background moving while the people look stationery. In one critical scene where Jack talks to Orlando about his dad’s suicide while they climb down a rock, the camera struggles with the light. But the vérité style, sprinkled with occasional sit-down interviews, makes the emotions all the more real and raw.

Dow also employs POV shots of the scenery and drone shots to complete the you-are-there feel of the film, which really puts you in front of everyone, feeling the emotions that are coming out.

Memorable Dialogue: When Gwennie expresses that all this talking about Evelyn makes things “any less painful or traumatic,” Orlando replies that “I don’t feel it’s any less traumatic talking about parts of Evelyn’s life, the bad parts. But it does become a lot easier to talk about him and think about him.” That was one of Orlando’s goals with this film; not to make Evelyn’s suicide any less painful, but just to make it easier for everyone to remember him, good and bad. Until that point, his name barely crossed any of the von Einsiedel siblings’ lips.

Our Take:Evelyn sounds like a boring film on the surface; after all, how interesting is it to see these people hike for 90 minutes? But the choice of Orlando von Einsiedel to make the film completely intimate, like you are on the hike with him and his family and friends, brings the subject matter home to anyone who watches. Just like all the people they encounter on their walks, suicide and mental illness has touched just about everyone’s lives in some way or another, and the von Einsiedel family’s willingness to open themselves up to the process of talking and grieving about it forces the viewer to think about their own situation.

What’s refreshing about the film is that the family isn’t trying to find answers, and they’re not trying to find peace. They’re simply trying to open up to each other about Evelyn, something they haven’t done in the 13 years since his suicide. That’s a lot of time to repress grief, and the sadness just simply flows out of everyone on the hike, including their seemingly implacable father Andres, the more they talk. There’s more than one occasion where someone stops walking — most of the time it’s Gwennie — because they’re overcome by the emotions involved in the discussion, whether it’s anger or grief or sadness or all three. Those shots, and the ones where there’s so much emotion flowing everyone hugs, are the ones that hit us in the gut the most.

There is also a storyline, where Orlando is encouraged to come out from the protection he’s given himself as the director. Yes, he’s on camera the whole time, leaving the technical details to his crew. But you see him at first being the one lobbing questions at everyone but not talking about Evelyn much himself. After Leon talks to him about letting those emotions go, Orlando opens up as much as everyone else, and that propels the rest of the film.

Our Call: STREAM IT.Evelyn is a tough film to watch at times, because of the rawness of the emotions everyone in the film displays. But if it helps you think about someone in your life who either isn’t here anymore because of suicide or might harm his or herself, it becomes a completely worthwhile watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

StreamEvelyn On Netflix