Three female friends in their early twenties get together for a weekend in the country in the wake of the death of the fourth in their tight knit group. There is not too much more to the narrative here, suffice to say that the film focuses on one of the group more than the other two, using her attempts to unlock the dead friend's phone as a way to remind us that they are struggling to let her go. Within this broad frame though, the film produces a very honest and natural feeling of friends. There isn't really one "big" scene which is written to within an inch of its live with the perfect dialogue and reaction, nor is there a tightness to the film, but instead it is snippets of moments of laughter, sadness, music, and normal lives tinged with that sadness lingering over them.
There are problems with Pagans, but the core trio isn't one of them, as they capture that sense of people of an age and place in their lives. The film encourages it and lets it happen, benefitting from it in so much as it buys us into the characters and adds a reason to care that the lack of structure and tightness means isn't really there by itself. There is a downside to this approach though, which is that the film feels messy and doesn't draw the viewer into the detail and heart of the situation as much as I would have liked; and the film does run a little long with some of the extended sequences of music etc contributing to that. It works though, because it sells the characters and their relationships in a way that feels as real and messy as life does.
