“Oh no, no, no, no, not another fucking cancer film,” was Stellan Skarsgård’s response when he was asked to be in Hope (aka Håp in the original Norwegian) by his old friend, its writer/director Maria Sødahl. Skarsgård has a point. The terminal illness weepie can itself be pretty deadly. But Hope is more about love and family life than about sickness. It doesn’t get too hung up on redemption. And it can boast fabulous performances all round, including from Skarsgård, who took the gig.
The true-to-lifeness undoubtedly has a lot to do with the fact that it really happened. In 2011 Maria Sødahl learned that the lung cancer she thought she’d recovered from had metastasized to her brain. According to the experts she was going to die. She recovered, obviously, and eventually decided to tell the story, sticking closely to some facts while lightly swapping out others.
Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård play the stand-ins for Sødahl and her husband, the director Hans Petter Moland. Anja and Tomas have been together for a long time, both of them successful arts industry creatives whose seemingly happy blended family life is upended when she receives her fateful diagnosis. We follow over seven days as Anja and Tomas try to get specialist help. But it’s Christmas and so the health service isn’t at full strength, plus there are family celebrations to organise, parties to attend and, to top it all, Anja’s birthday is approaching on New Year’s Eve.
A fixed smile goes only so far, and beneath the business-as-usual front put up by Anja and Tomas, they re-examine their relationship – terminal, maybe, like her diagnosis – though the sudden injection of a shared sense of purpose offers some hope for the future, if there is going to be one.
The arc of the film is something like the five stages of grief except the various stage of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are all jumbled up. Anja doesn’t know which way she’s going and Tomas doesn’t know how to help her, except to just be there with her.
Sødahl casts actual health professionals in the roles of the various doctors, specialists, nurses and therapists. I suspect that even the pharmacist in one scene, where Anja picks up her first batch of medicine and is recommended to take the first pills immediately, is an actual pharmacist too.
It is punchy detail like that – why so urgent with the pills if it isn’t really serious? – that give this film its power. That and the portrait of family life, especially over Christmas, when families go into a hyper family mode as if on a mission. Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård are both superbly tentative as a couple wondering what to do, but the actors playing various members of the family, in particular Elle Müller Osborne as daughter Julie, also pull out the stops to convey the special atmosphere of this time of the year.
“I hate sentimental cancer movies,” Sødahl told The Wrap in an interview. Illness weepies can be a trudge. To stave off mawkishness, she keeps the pace up, entering scenes late and keeping the camera fluid. The loose, quick approach helps to reinforce the sense of eavesdropping on intimate moments, which works particularly powerfully when Anja and Tomas finally get confessional and say the things to each other that they have been withholding. The soundscape throughout, slightly loud, suggests life going on as normal amid the new chaos.
How gracious Skarsgård is in the second fiddle role. Bræin Hovig is the focus here and the film’s star. She elicits a sympathy that’s never cloying, though you might shed the odd tear. Probably several depending on how sentimental you are.
Hope – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
