Parachute
The first time I watched Parachute, I thought it would be another quiet indie drama about young people with vague “issues.” Something artsy but forgettable.
But around 15 minutes in I caught myself holding my breath, and on my second watch, I still did.
Not because the film is suspenseful, but because it cracked open a part of me I usually keep buried. A place that still pulses with shame, silence, and fear. A part of me that has never known how to ask for help, only how to hide.
I’ve lived with disordered eating for years.
Mine didn’t arrive with a dramatic collapse or a diagnosis shouted across a hospital room. It came quietly. Casually. Like a whisper that became a rule.
It started with just being “good” about food. A skipped meal here. A mental checklist of calories there. A compulsion to be just a little smaller, a little less, a little more in control. It wasn’t really about thinness, it never truly is. It was about disappearing when life got too loud. About punishing my body for feeling too much, taking up too much, wanting too much.
That’s what Parachute captures so painfully well, not the surface symptoms, but the invisible architecture of the struggle.
Watching Riley weigh herself in silence… or smile through a meal she doesn’t want to eat… or glance at herself in the mirror like she’s witnessing something shameful, it felt like looking into a mirror I’ve spent years avoiding. I saw myself in those scenes, not the “strong” version I show to the world, but the quiet, hurting version I try to keep hidden from even those closest to me.
The me who still, some mornings, believes that thinness equals worth.
The me who still has to fight, every single day, to believe that eating isn’t failure.
That nourishment is not something I have to earn.
Then there’s Ethan, and the love that doesn’t fix you.
Ethan, the man Riley meets, doesn’t rescue her. Their relationship isn’t romanticized or neatly resolved. And I’m so grateful for that.
Because no partner, no matter how gentle or devoted, can fix what you’ve been taught to hate about yourself.
What Parachute gets so right is the tightrope between intimacy and healing. How love, even the softest kind, can sometimes feel unbearable when you’re still learning how to love yourself. How being seen, truly seen, can be the most terrifying part of recovery. And how sometimes, connection doesn’t ease the pain. Sometimes, it sharpens it.
I’ve been Riley. And I’ve also been with people like Ethan, people who tried to love me while I was still at war with myself. And no matter how well they loved me, their love often felt like a spotlight I wasn’t ready for. Like a mirror I didn’t want to look into. And eventually, that pressure, that reflection, became too much.
But this film never blames either of them. It just tells the truth. Quietly. Unflinchingly.
Watching Parachute hurt. And maybe that’s why it mattered so much.
I had to pause it more than once. There were scenes I couldn’t get through without tears. Not because of what was happening, but because of what it brought up in me, memories, feelings, thoughts I hadn’t let myself sit with in a long time.
But by the end, I realized, this story didn’t break me. It met me. It sat down beside the scared, tired version of me that’s still learning how to stay. Still learning how to be here, in a body that has spent years trying to shrink itself out of existence.
And it whispered something I didn’t know I needed to hear:
The act of falling, when it’s slowed by something like love, or friendship, or even the faintest bit of self compassion, can become something else.
Not a crash.
Not an ending.
But a landing.
Maybe even a soft one.