Before Anything You Say is a 2017 Canadian experimental domestic drama film directed and produced by Shelagh Carter and written by Deborah Schnitzer about a couple struggling to maintain their love and marriage even as a life-altering decision threatens to tear them apart.

[3] While on vacation in Paris, a couple are faced with a crisis when Jack (Darcy Fehr) announces his intent to pursue a dangerous job that would require him to live in Bangkok for five years, working to combat human trafficking.

He assumes that his wife Isobel (Kristen Harris) will follow, leaving her life and career behind.

Hurt and feeling misunderstood by one another, they attempt to reconcile their lives and love in Paris while Jack attends business meetings, and in their recently built dream home in Winnipeg.

[1][note 1] The theme of abandonment is seeded throughout the film through brief inserts of other people: younger women, the woman at the coffee shop, the woman at the bar, the couple walking on the street, seeing the girls out the window, shots of long-haired women walking away from the camera:It's tied to what hasn't been addressed within the couple.

[1] The earliest film to inspire Carter was Hiroshima Mon Amour, a collaboration between Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras:He always drove home working with writers and he wanted to see if cinema could tolerate language.

[5][9] At the same time, Carter's husband had just taken advantage of an opportunity which took him elsewhere, and "he was gone and here I was, in the prairies, by myself, in the place he wanted to move to.

"[1] Their relationship was the "springboard" for Carter and Schnitzer, who drew on an experience of her own walking along the Champs-Élysées, an argument with her own husband of "epic proportions" whose revelations "we scarcely comprehend even now.

"[5] Carter and Schnitzer talked about how painful it was, "when you miss each other, when you think you know the other person ... and then suddenly they take a Left turn.

"[1] When it came to the structure of the script for Before Anything You Say, Carter wanted to play with past and present, and to experiment with memory.

[1] Around the time that Carter had gone to see Schnitzer with her story idea, they had both just seen Darcy Fehr in the role of George in a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

"[1] It is unclear what the budget for Before Anything You Say was, or whether the film had sponsorship beyond C$12,010 raised by November 2015 on crowdfunding website Indiegogo.

[11] The film was shot over six days by cinematographer Ousama Rawi, who first worked with Carter on One Night.

[1]Before Anything You Say was editor Chad Tremblay's first feature but he and Carter had already worked many times before on short films:He's one of my former students.

[1]Carter referred to David Mamet saying that editing is like a dream: "your subconscious is going to show you only what you want to see.

[1] Post-production took place in Toronto under the supervision of Pete Soltesz, a producer on Carter's next film, Into Invisible Light.

[note 2] Before Anything You Say had its North American premiere at La Femme International Film Festival in Los Angeles on 22 October 2017.

[19][16] The Canadian premiere took place at the Gimli Film Festival on 27 and 28 July 2018 to sold-out crowds,[20] followed by a limited release in Winnipeg in October.

Sheila O'Malley called Before Anything You Say an "extremely intense" film, a sometimes "hallucinatory" study of what happens when things are left unsaid, when trust is broken, when the mere prospect of "breaking up" becomes the cause of a break-up to start, in which both leads give "phenomenal performances".A deeply unsettling film, beautifully written, acted, and directed, it's a poignant and profound film, and it has a "mess" to its structure and approach (I mean that as highest praise) that is a welcome change to the easily-summed-up and easily-digested material that now passes for "adult relationship" dramas.

[1] Greg Klymkiw says the film "does not disappoint in the long-honoured snipe-fest sweepstakes" in terms of the "dazzling cinematic potential of watching two great actors verbally slugging it out against the backdrop of claustrophobic domestic strife":Carter's previous outing Passionflower, a harrowing portrait of mental illness, solidified her position as one of Canada's leading practitioners of searingly glorious psychological melodrama and this new film manages to up the ante by delving into territory that blends the delectable properties of 70s "menopause movies" (typified by the likes of Gilbert Cates's Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams) and the sorrow-laden relationship gymnastics of Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour).

[23]Klymkiw goes on to praise Deborah Schnitzer's "fine" screenplay, the "sumptuous" cinematography of Ousama Rawi, Taavo Soodor's "impeccable" production design, Keri Latimer's "haunting" score and editor Chad Tremblay's "hypnotic" cutting, concluding that the one-hour drama could have "sustained itself for even longer.