This Inside Llewyn Davis essay contains spoilers. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s 2013 film features Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake. Check out VV movie reviews, along with cast/character articles, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

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While the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis primarily revolves around a musician hungry for success within the waning genre of folk music during the 1960s, it is grief that emerges as the film’s veneer. The overwhelming emotion cloaks every element, including the visuals, the featured music, Oscar Isaac’s downtrodden lead performance and the overall structure. Grief is a quiet but unrelenting presence within Inside Llewyn Davis that gradually reveals itself the more viewers learn about the death of Mike Timlin, the protagonist’s friend and singing partner.

The Coens immediately immerse the audience in Llewyn’s pathos through frosty, blue-gray cinematography. Every image has a hazy look, as if the frame has been placed under a bell jar and audiences must peer through from the outside. The dark gray saturation from French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel makes the Greenwich Village setting seem drab, lending the sludge of snowy puddles and icy breaths that escape from passersby’s mouths a rough bitterness. The city is just as frozen and empty as Llewyn.

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Taking place during the dead of winter in February 1961, Inside Llewyn Davis’ focal season symbolizes death and despair in the skeletal, bare trees and cold, isolating atmosphere. It is an empty and dormant season before the revitalization of spring, which often feels very far away under such harsh conditions. In the same way, the prospect of overcoming such heartache after losing a loved one feels distant and unattainable for Isaac’s protagonist. It seems impossible that he will ever experience the light and warmth of happiness again.

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Winter also coincides with the holidays, one of the most difficult times to reconcile with a loss. Family gatherings often bring into sharp focus the realities of losing loved ones. Every new year marks another without them, and shared time gradually fades into a distant memory. Despite the absence of explicit references to seasonal observances, Inside Llewyn Davis’ time period suggests that Mike’s death feels especially painful for the main characters due to the holiday season.

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Isaac’s masterful performance is a subtle but impactful portrayal of the anger and impression that Llewyn carries in the wake of Mike’s death. These stages of grief inform all of the main protagonist’s harsh actions, from heckling musicians at The Gaslight Cafe to exploding at a dinner party. Llewyn is combative with nearly everyone he engages with, and his words always drip with bitterness and sarcasm, such as when Isaac’s character calls Jean (Carey Mulligan) a sad and square careerist or tells Roland Turner (John Goodman) to shove a cane up his ass. But what Llewyn says is not as important as what he doesn’t say. There’s so much more to what the protagonist communicates in the silence and dark flashes across his face, which are permanently etched with a furrowed brow and frown. One of the only times Llewyn smiles throughout the entire film is when he schmoozes with a Columbia Records producer. It almost feels jarring to see Isaac’s character so lighthearted given his persistent blankness throughout the 104-minute drama.

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Whenever Mike’s name comes up, Llewyn typically ignores a comment or swiftly changes the subject. But his eyes always flicker as if someone has just sliced his heart open. It is a credit to Isaac’s nimble artistry that viewers can easily understand that Llewyn is in denial about Mike’s death — another stage of grief where individuals experience numbness and a sense of disbelief. The actor sensitively crafts a character who encloses himself within a shell of mourning and all the difficult emotions it brings, making it difficult to get inside Llewyn, as the film’s title suggests.

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“I don’t see a lot of money here,” Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) tells Llewyn during an impromptu audition at the Gate of Horn. It is not hard to see why the protagonist receives this feedback, as his general glum demeanor complements his performance of “The Death of Queen Jane.” While gently moving, the song has grim lyrics about a queen who dies during childbirth. The baby is rescued and celebrated amongst the kingdom, but Queen Jane lays “cold as a stone” in her grave. Nearly every song that Oscar’s protagonist performs during Inside Llewyn Davis — save for the cheeky novelty tune “Please Mr. Kennedy” — is tinged with death. The first time Llewyn appears in the film, he croons “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” a languid yarn about a man who reflects on his world travels before humbly accepting the rope around the neck to seal his fate. Even “The Shoals of Herring,” a gentle song from Llewyn’s childhood that he replays for his father in a nursing home, ends its nostalgic reverie of seafaring days with a line about “growing old or dying.”

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Traditional folk music often features sparse instrumentation, specifically the gentle strumming or fingerpicking of an acoustic guitar. The soft and simplistic vocals allow one to concentrate on the singer’s raw emotions and their personal or historical storytelling. The songs are often poignant tales of loss, heartache and longing that have been passed down from generation to generation, uniting listeners in the joys and hardships of life. All of these qualities make folk music a pensive genre and therefore an ideal outlet for Llewyn to express his hushed grief. Isaac’s character wants to use his music to communicate the truth of what he feels — for him, it’s not a mere “parlor game” as he tells the Gorfein family. Llewyn ridicules performers at The Gaslight Cafe for being too guileless, unwilling to confront the real-life struggles of the world through their art.

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“Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” is the film’s pivotal song that articulates the void Mike has left in Llewyn’s life. At the beginning of Inside Llewyn Davis, Oscar’s protagonist plays the folk tune on the Gorfein family’s record player (a track from their fictional album “If We Had Wings”). On the cover, the Coens provide the first and only glimpse of Mike, a cheerful fellow with his mouth stretched in a singing smile, his arm outstretched as if he is pretending to be the bird in the song. The duet is pleasant, accompanied by two acoustic guitars, a mandolin and fiddle. Llewyn offers a steady undertone beneath Mike’s clear and strong vocals, their voices blending seamlessly and soaring in perfect harmony. “Life ain’t worth living without the one you love,” they lament, which is the central tenet of the film. For Llewyn, life without Mike has not been worth living, and Grossman’s observation that the protagonist would be better suited as a duet partner tears him apart, though the protagonist conceals it outwardly. Isaac makes it clear behind his piercing eyes that Llewyn is acutely aware of this — that Mike’s absence has left a deep hole in his life, both artistically and personally.

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When Llewyn performs “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” once again in the final scene as a solo, it has different words and structure. The protagonist’s performance is more raw, as Isaac’s character growls out the lyrics as if he is keening for everything he has lost. The final lines — “You’ll call my name / And I’ll be gone / I’d fly the river to the one I love / Fare thee well, oh, honey, fare thee well” — have a firmness that sounds as if Llewyn is truly bidding goodbye — or adieu, as he says at the end of the film — to Mike and his artistic dreams. Will Isaac’s character join the United States Merchant Marine again? Or is Llewyn trapped in this ouroboros of despair where he will continue to make mistakes and miss chances? The circular narrative encapsulates the repetitive and unrelenting nature of grief, where every single day is marred by the painful realization that the person you’ve lost will never return. You will never talk to them again, or hold them, or create another memory with them. These lost moments with Mike linger over the entirety of Inside Llewyn Davis, creating an understated yet touching aesthetic of mourning.

Caroline Madden (@crolinss) is the author of Springsteen as Soundtrack. She’s also a film critic who has written for Screen Queens, Reverse Shot, IndieWire and more. Caroline is the Editor in Chief of Video Librarian.

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