Movies about breast cancer are generally aimed at women. Most of them are designed to make us cry.
Reinout Oerlemans’s offering (an adaptation of Dutch author Ray Kluun’s best-selling autobiographical novel) tries to mess with the formula. The big problem is that our narrator hero, Stejn (Barry Atsma), is a rich playboy whose life resembles an advert for WKD vodka.
We’re supposed to feel a tinge of envy but that’s impossible because he is clearly a twit whose dream life is temporarily shattered when his wife discovers a tumour. What the film gets right are the details, from radiation burns to ugly prosthetics. Carice van Houten, as terrified thirtysomething Carmen, also delivers her bald lines with energy. She’s confused about her ugly illness, she’s confused about her pretty partner. The film is no wiser. It’s enough to make you weep.
Love Life
Cert: 15
