Miranda Richardson in The Hours (2002)

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Suicide may be painless for those tortured souls who slide down the anesthetized slope into eternity, but the people left behind are plagued with a need to understand that can span generations and centuries. When English author Virginia Woolf walked weighted and grimly determined into a pond of death, her legacy was already firmly established with such works as Mrs. Dalloway, the novel that is the lynchpin for The Hours (2002). Three separate but inter-reflective plots tell the stories of Virginia Woolf composing her masterpiece, a 1950s American housewife contemplating snuffing her own life, and a new-millennium lesbian who is unable to keep her best friend away from open windows. The need to understand has seldom been more wrenchingly or touchingly expressed.