More Than Ever review – thoughtful drama about how to die well

Cinema has traditionally had a rather dubious relationship with the subject of terminal disease. Imminent death is dressed up in a decorative swirl of romance; patients tend to remain photogenically asymptomatic until the last possible moment. But director and co-writer Emily Atef’s More Than Ever is different. This French and English-language drama is a film about taking ownership over the end of life; about dying personally and, if necessary, selfishly.

Vicky Krieps, so wonderfully frosty and autocratic in Corsage, shows another, more emotionally friable side of her considerable range as Hélène. Diagnosed with a degenerative lung disease, Hélène is struggling to come to terms with an aspect of her life – its cessation – that she is unable to fully share with her husband, Matthieu (the late Gaspard Ulliel in one of his final film roles). Finding it increasingly hard to deal with his desperate, dogged optimism, she turns to the internet, trawling through end-of-life blogs. There she finds a kindred spirit in “Mister” (Bjørn Floberg), who has cancer and whose mordant humour and irreverent approach chimes with her own. To Matthieu’s consternation, Hélène decides to visit Mister in his isolated home on the fringes of a fjord in Norway.

Atef (3 Days in Quiberon) neatly captures Hélène’s existential crisis in the juxtaposition between the vast possibilities of the Scandinavian landscape and the small, dark, stone-walled fisher’s shed in which she chooses to sleep; between the desire that Hélène still feels for her husband and the physical limitations that her disease places on her ability to express her sexuality. Ultimately, the key to a meaningful death is, the film argues, the same as in life: being true to yourself.