TIFF ’24: Counting It All in “Addition”

By Abe Friedtanzer

We all hide things from people when we first meet them, and sometimes it feels like it’s too late to share them by the time a relationship has gotten more serious. Some secrets are more significant than others and can have a drastic effect on the way people communicate with and relate to each other. Addition portrays a scenario where one woman forces herself to hide her crippling anxiety from her new boyfriend, creating turmoil for herself and a difficult, if not impossible, path forward for their romance...

Grace (Teresa Palmer) needs to count everything. At home, she imagines Nikola Tesla (Eamon Farren), by her side, conversing about the wonderful world of numbers. Her work as a mathematician is one way of feeding her obsessive behavior, which in some cases force her to take drastic action, like distracting a man in the supermarket so that she can steal one of his bananas to have an even ten. After that petty theft, that man, Seamus (Joe Dempsie), takes a liking to her and the two begin a relationship. While Grace’s family is happy to hear that she’s finally dating, they’re also well aware of how she needs to operate and that not sharing that part of herself won’t lead anywhere good.

There’s a bubbliness to this film, which shows us what Grace is seeing, in the form of numbers and calculations popping up everywhere, including on Seamus’ eyelashes. She can’t turn this part of herself off, but being with Seamus enables her to mute it long enough to be present, even if she still can’t do certain things, like go to a buffet where she won’t be able to calculate the precise number of bites she needs to take or to travel out of town to an unpredictable location setup. It can be crippling at times, particularly when she misses a date because she needs to count the number of bristles on her toothbrush three times (it’s over two thousand) and then rush to the store to buy ninety spares in case the company stops making them.

Though most audiences won’t suffer from this particular condition, everyone should be able to relate to obsessive behavior of some sort and the steps people take to cope, adapt, and heal. Its framing as a romantic comedy works well even if some of its best moments find Grace interacting with her niece and working through trauma with her family and her therapist. Palmer, who has previously starred in films like Warm Bodies and Kill Me Three Times, as well as the TV series A Discovery of Witches, is a fun lead, though this is hardly her best performance. This film is light and entertaining, with just enough drama mixed in to make sure it feels emphatic and not just like fluff. B

Addition makes its world premiere in the Centrepiece section at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.