This essay examines Kenneth Lonergan's stunning and underviewed New York City film Margaret (2011), placing it in a larger corpus of post-9/11 artistic production while also drawing out its Victorian intertexts—most notably, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that gives the film its title. Margaret derives its organizing thematics and formal experiments with sound from the Victorian cultural trope of hyperesthesia: the drive to look beyond the self (the protagonist, the nation) and the answering anxiety that doing so would mean being overwhelmed by the frequency of human suffering. Margaret demonstrates the continued pull of Victorian aesthetics and politics of representation on contemporary literature and film and, I argue, the cost of this persistence. At once emphasizing and occluding the far-reaching and long-lasting violence of formal and informal empire, Margaret carefully attunes us to particular forms of suffering—but only by disattuning us to global catastrophe.