Sunday night, Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found dead in their home. I never met Mr. Reiner but his work was such an immense part of my childhood, especially The Princess Bride.

I was nine the first time I saw The Princess Bride, watching it at a friend’s house in a double-feature with Spaceballs both introduced as “two of the best movies” that I absolutely needed to see. My buddy Sean was completely right, and that double-feature would get repeated pretty much every time we got together all the way from fourth grade through college. I have worn out two VHS copies and one DVD copy of The Princess Bride. Did you know it’s possible to watch a DVD so many times that it stops working? I didn’t until I did.

And bits and pieces of this eminently quotable movie made their way into everyday speech for my friends. Poetry would be met with “Stop rhyming, I mean it!” “Anybody want a peanut?” We actually made a sign for a teacher in high school to label his classroom as The Pit of Despair. We would shout out during pick up soccer games “THERE WILL BE NO SURVIVORS!” in our best Fezzik.

In college, I took up fencing lessons specifically because of the duel between Westley and Inigo.

There’s plenty of talk about the amazing work Reiner did all through his career and how his first seven movies would be amazing to have on your resume at all, let alone as your first seven in a row. But, The Princess Bride has always been my special movie. It’s the one that I associate with preteen hangouts, its the one I associate with the need for a comfort watch I don’t need to think about during college and law school, it’s the childhood movie I was most excited to share with my daughter. It’s a movie friends of mine had quoted at their wedding.

I’m far from alone in my love of The Princess Bride as a comfort movie.

On its surface, it’s a movie about a guy chasing down the woman he loves to win her back from a creepy prince. But then you add the tragedy of grief in Inigo wanting his father back, you son of a bitch. Then you get into the friendship and banter of Inigo and Fezzik. Then you get scenes like Miracle Max and the fight “to the pain.”

When I was in law school, I took a course on Alternative Dispute Resolution. That’s stuff like negotiation, mediation, arbitration, the stuff you do so that you don’t have to do the work of a whole lawsuit. In the class, we had a section on the role of lawyers as storytellers. The professor started that section with the love story between Westley and Buttercup that starts the movie. During that scene, there is not a word wasted in the narration, there is not a shot wasted in the cinematography, not a single glance by the stars that fails to do its part to tell the story. Everything is just this well-oiled machine of storytelling where Reiner knew exactly what each piece was needed for. And that pacing, that intentionality, just continues through the whole movie.

So, if you find yourself looking at all that 2025 is serving up at the end of the year and thinking you could use some comfort, The Princess Bride is absolutely the film you should put on.