Blackbird

A film about a weekend in a house by the sea. Lily is ill. The disease is advancing, before long she will not be able to move on her own, and she does not want to wait for that. She has made her decision. She will end her life on Sunday and she has told her family. Her husband is a doctor. He manages the medication and says he respects his wife's decision. Her two daughters arrive. Jennifer is orderly, married, and trying to find her mother's decision reasonable; Anna is a mess, using drugs, and had nearly not come. There is a friend of the family as well. Liz has been inside this house for years and knows something she believes nobody else knows. From there the film spreads across three days. A dinner, a walk, a holiday celebrated early, and a last morning. What the narrative is interested in is not death but permission: the film does not open the decision to debate; what it really wonders about is the others being made to take part in it. Anna's line is the hardest. Her not being ready to lose her mother touches a family secret and the table is overturned. The source is a Danish film. It is an American remake of Stille hjerte, from 2014, and the plot is largely the same. The acting carries the film. The camera is mostly still, the scenes are long, and everything resolves in the faces. Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Mia Wasikowska, Sam Neill and Lindsay Duncan are in the cast. Roger Michell directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes actor-led family drama. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot keep some distance from the subject; the film does not argue about assisted death, it stands around a decision already taken.