The weepy illness movie is a potentially irksome beast. It’s just too easy to stick a sick person on screen and ask us to pity them. Nino doesn’t play it that way. The film follows a diffident young man from the moment he receives a diagnosis of throat cancer over the long weekend leading up to his first dose of (emergency) chemo. And then leaves him.
Should we pity Nino (Théodore Pellerin)? Does he somehow deserve what’s happened to him? Director and co-writer Pauline Loquès sets us a challenge as she challenges her subject – a closed-off dude who receives the bad news on his 29th birthday (tellingly, he doesn’t correct the doctor when she describes him as being 28). Nino only came in because he had a sore throat and now this – presented with the news that he has squamous cell carcinoma and that the chemotherapy necessary to destroy it will also destroy his chances of having children. Even while reeling from this news, Nino is being packed off to reproductive services on the fifth floor, where he’s expected to jerk off into a plastic container, to save some bits of his DNA in case the future requires them.
From here we get a weekend with Nino, who is incapable of telling his ex girlfriend he’s ill, incapable even of telling his mother (Jean Balibar), to whom he is obviously very close. Into an accidental encounter with a girl he used to know at school, who is now a single mother. To a party where he’s also closed off and uptight, and obviously battling an internal desire to flee every social encounter.
The film is constructed as a series of potential turning points. Will Nino make a clean breast of it with somebody, to get his secret into the open and to start living a normal, connected life?
Along the way a gentle mocking of the prevailing discourse on “fighting” cancer. Everywhere Nino goes there are posters, bumper stickers, cards, proclaiming a “yes we can” “go for it” “you’ve got this” positivity. Reality, Loquès and co-writer Maud Ameline want to suggest, is dirtier and more complex.
In the end the film turns on Nino’s need to get some sperm into that plastic cup, and Loquès and Ameline come up with a funny way of connecting the soon-to-be-sterile Nino with some chance of a future, while also presenting him with a chance of a meaningful relationship.
It’s a gentle, distinctly non-weepy approach. We don’t pity Nino because he’s so hard to know. The fact that he is fascinating in spite of being closed off is down to the performance by Théodore Pellerin – so excellent in the film Lurker, where he played a needy superfan. His face full of big features suits him to the role and he’s just as good here as he was in Lurker, working the whole time, projecting inner dysfunction with a flicker rather than a roar.
The rest of the cast trail along in Pellerin’s wake but they’re good. Balibar as his mother, Salomé Dewaels as Zoé, the old school mate he can’t really remember that well, if at all. Mathieu Amalric turns up for a brief but decisive blur-on and Camille Rutherford also does good work as Nino’s ex, who obviously dumped him because he’s a mopey, indecisive sort who’s never “got this” and possibly never will, sweet though he is.
The illness movie for people who have had enough of them, with the illness doubling up as a metaphor for Nino’s psychologicial condition. I went into it wary and came out fully engaged, the film having gently woven a spell. Very nicely done.
Nino – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
