Is This Thing On? – What a Quiet Indie Film Teaches About Divorce, Communication, and the Courage to Change

There is a small, quiet film called Is This Thing On? that, despite its modest scope, lands with surprising emotional force—especially for anyone who works with, or has lived through, the unraveling of a long-term marriage.

On the surface, it is a story about a middle-aged man attempting stand-up comedy. Underneath, it is about something much more familiar to divorcing couples: what happens when two people wake up and realize they have been living beside each other rather than with each other.

The film follows Alex, a husband and father who feels invisible in his own life. His marriage has not exploded in anger or betrayal; it has simply gone quiet. Conversations are transactional. Resentments are buried. Emotional bids are missed. Eventually, Alex turns to comedy—not because he wants fame, but because he is desperate to be heard.

That premise may sound far removed from mediation, but it is not.

In my work as a divorce mediator, I often see couples who are not locked in dramatic conflict. Instead, they are disconnected. They speak, but they are not understood. They listen, but they are not really heard. Like Alex and his wife in the film, their relationship has slowly lost the feedback loop that makes intimacy possible.

So many couples stop taking emotional risks long before they separate. They stop saying what they actually feel. They stop asking for what they need. They stop telling the small truths because it feels safer not to. Over time, the relationship becomes polite, efficient, and hollow.

What the film also captures beautifully is the grief of realizing that the life you built no longer fits. There is no villain here. No catastrophic event. Just two people who have outgrown the version of themselves they were when they chose each other.

That is a reality many divorcing couples struggle to name. They often believe that if no one did anything “wrong,” then they should be able to fix it. But emotional drift can be just as powerful as conflict. When partners no longer feel seen, valued, or emotionally safe, the relationship erodes—even if the logistics still function.

Mediation, at its best, creates a space where people can finally be heard again—sometimes for the first time in years. Not so that the marriage can be repaired, but so that it can be ended with clarity, dignity, and less damage.

Like a good comedy set, a good mediation requires truth, timing, and the courage to say the thing that has been left unsaid.

Is This Thing On? is not a divorce movie, but it is very much a movie about the emotional conditions that lead people there: silence, longing, and the need to feel alive and recognized. It reminds us that people do not usually leave relationships because they want something else. They leave because they cannot find themselves anymore inside what they have.

For anyone navigating divorce—or helping others through it—the film offers a gentle but powerful message: being heard matters.