MISS YOU ALREADY

If watching someone’s health slowly deteriorate over two hours sounds like your idea of a good night out, then Miss You Already has it all. From infertility to double mastectomies and brain cancer, this one is actually less fun to sit through than it sounds.

On paper, the story of two childhood friends navigating illness and hardship has the potential for emotional catharsis in the vein of Beaches (1988), but the parts of Catherine Hardwicke’s disjointed movie all work against each other.

The jokes aren’t funny, and the neither of the two main characters have the charisma to turn their traumas into ours.

Toni Collette does her best with a deeply unpleasant role, but Drew Barrymore is clearly punching above her weight and Paddy Considine seems to have wandered in from a Richard Curtis movie. The choice of shooting intimate scenes with a camera more suited to carrying out an endoscopic examination does nothing to bolster the absence of emotional heft. Feel-good it’s not.