An Inventory of Exits

A three-hour documentary about a demolition crew that becomes, without announcing it, one of the great films about work. Tomas Renn follows a team through a single year of tear-downs — warehouses, a school, a tower that still had someone's curtains in the windows. The camera stays with the labour. It does not cut away for metaphor. The metaphor arrives on its own.

What Renn understands is that work has a rhythm, and that rhythm is more interesting than most plots. Men and women who know how a building comes apart. The care required to destroy something safely. The jokes at lunch. The quiet after a wall falls. An Inventory of Exits never tells you what to feel. It shows you people doing a job until the job has shown you who they are.

Three hours sounds long. It is not. The best thing anyone made last year — and the rare documentary that trusts duration as a form of respect.