REVIEW: A Family Comes Together In Kate Winslet’s Deeply Moving Directorial Debut ‘Goodbye June’
- Emma Fisher
- 12 hours ago
- 5 min read
This article contains spoilers for Goodbye June.
Goodbye June is a deeply moving family drama that captures the ache of impending loss and the torment of anticipatory grief with a recognisable truthfulness, particularly during the festive period. At its centre is June, played with heartbreaking fragility by Helen Mirren, an elderly matriarch whose cancer has spread to various parts of her body after her last round of chemotherapy was not as effective as once hoped. What follows is an unsparing look at her final days, witnessed by her fractured, dysfunctional, and loving family. Although the film is, at its core, about death, it’s just as much about those left to confront the shattering realisation that there is nothing that they can do to keep it at bay, and the often-messy attempts they make to meet it with whatever grace they can muster.
Timothy Spall is especially affecting as Bernard, June’s husband. He is frail, forgetful, occasionally infuriating, and, later, overwhelmed by grief he cannot yet process. His old age is worn on him, and he seems on the brink of physically and mentally breaking at any moment. June, meanwhile, begins the film collapsing from breathing difficulties. Her family arrives at the hospital only to learn that her cancer has spread aggressively through her abdomen and pelvis, that further treatment would be cruel rather than helpful, and that there is now no meaningful intervention left. The doctors’ blunt gentleness reflects, with awful precision, the suffocating stillness of conversations in which your world shrinks after you are informed that your loved one is terminal. Quietly, and almost apologetically, it's confirmed that June is unlikely to live to Christmas, barely two weeks away.
The family consists of three sisters: Julia (Kate Winslet), Molly (Andrea Riseborough), and Helen (Toni Collette), and their brother, Connor (Johnny Flynn), all of whom could not be more different from one another. Julia is an overstretched mother of three; Molly, juggling four children of her own, is self-righteous to the point of comedy (her refusal of a non-organic sandwich is priceless, particularly when her child promptly takes a bite out of his cousin’s instead). Helen is the pregnant free spirit abroad, teaching holistic dance therapy, and Connor, troubled and evidently vulnerable, still lives at home. The relationships between them, and particularly between Julia and Molly, have been strained for years. Once their worst fears about June are confirmed, snipes, blame, and resentment emerge between the two who do not wish to be near the other. Molly even goes as far as to create a visiting rota so that their time with their mother never crosses. If you have lived through something similar, it’s all painfully believable.
As the eldest sister, Winslet’s Julia brings a worn pragmatism that would push anyone to their breaking point. Her confrontation with Molly, in which years of resentment spill out, is one of the film’s finest scenes, played in an empty hospital corridor. Molly reveals her bitterness at feeling abandoned when Julia left home at thirteen and built what she assumes is a life in which Julia has it all (she doesn’t). Julia, in turn, carries the guilt of missing her children’s lives because she works to support everyone, and neither sister wants to admit that they need each other, and will need each other even more once their mother is gone. The reconciliation that follows, orchestrated by June, who wants to pass knowing her family is together again, feels hard-earned.
June, meanwhile, grows increasingly fragile. Her distress at the everyday indignities of dying, from wishing to no longer receive blood-thinning injections in her stomach, to the frustration of not being able to use the toilet, to her desire to look presentable, is portrayed with such honesty that it’s impossible not to think of your own parents or grandparents. These moments are softened slightly by Nurse Angel (Fisayo Akinade), whose gentle presence offers June a dignity and patience that families often cannot manage in their own grief. He also forms a bond with Connor, allowing him to process what he is about to lose after sharing that he lost his own mother as a child. He has since made it his duty to ensure that people get good goodbyes, a promise the film honours.
Her clarity comes and goes, but in one of her most lucid moments, she asks Julia and Molly to help her write a letter for Helen and her unborn baby, a gesture the film returns to in its final moments. In another, she earnestly tells Julia that she hopes to come back as snow so she can still be with her family at Christmas, then innocently asks, “You don’t mind if I die, do you, darling?” Though there isn’t a moment in Goodbye June when Mirren isn't breaking your heart, her most devastating scenes are those in silence. A shot of her lying in the darkness of her hospital room with tears streaming down her face is among the film’s most agonising images, one that will stay with me for a long time.
Winslet directs with the confidence and sensitivity of somebody who has been doing this for years, despite Goodbye June being her directorial debut. She builds the film’s world with an actor’s understanding, stripping the sets to their essentials and favouring unshowy compositions with longtime collaborator Alwin H. Küchler. The result is a hospital environment that feels lived-in rather than clinical, shaped by days spent observing NHS wards and realised through Alison Harvey’s production design. Winslet’s choices, from locking off cameras and stepping away to give actors privacy to creating an inclusive space for the seven child performers, who are each brilliant within an environment that is difficult for children to understand in real life, never mind through fiction, speak to a director who understands the emotions of the story she is telling. It’s a film that certainly deserves BAFTA attention when the time comes.
The film’s final act builds towards an inevitable but heartwarming end. Bernard, struggling to face the reality of losing his wife, initially retreats into drink and denial, prompting Connor to confront him in another one of the film’s gut-wrenching scenes. Knowing June will not live to Christmas, the family bring the holiday forward, complete with a nativity performed by the grandchildren on the hospital’s top floor. These moments are tender and dignified, but no less devastating as a family comes together in loss and love.
“Good memories live forever,” June narrates in her letter, “just like me.” In its snowy ending a year later, Goodbye June suggests that this is true.
About Goodbye June
Release Date: In Select Theatres December 12, on Netflix December 24.
Writer: Joe Anders
Director: Kate Winslet
Production: Kate Solomon and Kate Winslet
Distribution: Netflix
Cast: Toni Collette, Johnny Flynn, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Spall, Kate Winslet and Helen Mirren.
Additional Cast: Stephen Merchant, Fisayo Akinade, Jeremy Swift, and Raza Jaffrey.
Synopsis: The film takes place just before Christmas, when an unexpected turn in their mother’s health thrusts four adult siblings and their exasperating father into chaos, as they navigate messy family dynamics in the face of potential loss. But their quick-witted mother, June, orchestrates her decline on her own terms — with biting humour, blunt honesty, and a lot of love.
