![]() In 2017, The Washington Post decreed The Bright Hour “ this year’s ‘When Breath Becomes Air.’” In a Modern Love–ian twist, the Post followed up last month with a story about how Kalanithi and Riggs’s surviving spouses, Lucy Kalanithi and John Duberstein, are now dating.Īs a post-diagnosis declaration of intent, Irreplaceable You joins a sweet, sad, and robust body of recent literature. The writer Nina Riggs was 38 when she was told her breast cancer was incurable she wrote the memoir The Bright Hour and her own Modern Love column, “ When a Couch Is More Than a Couch,” about her search for a sofa for her husband and young sons to use after she was gone. The neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, diagnosed with stage IV metastatic lung cancer in 2013, wrote essays and then the memoir When Breath Becomes Air, published posthumously, about his diagnosis and the birth of his first child mere days after a stint Kalanithi spent in the ICU. Rosenthal, by then deep in the throes of ovarian cancer, died 10 days after the column was published, and Universal subsequently won a bidding war for the rights to her story. Last year, the author Amy Krouse Rosenthal penned a piece titled “ You May Want to Marry My Husband,” which posited itself as a sort of dating profile for Rosenthal’s spouse of 26 years. If the movie’s premise sounds a bit like a New York Times Modern Love column, it’s because it closely parallels more than one. ![]() ![]() Upon receiving her bleak diagnosis, Abbie sets about finding a new partner for her about-to-be-nearly-widowed fiancé, Sam (Michiel Huisman). It is in part, of course, as well as one about learning to accept one’s own impending demise, but the plot here turns on something more specific. If this sounds like a spoiler, it isn’t really: Irreplaceable You isn’t a movie about dying. Scarcely a minute into the runtime, a shot of the Manhattan skyline pans down to show the tombstone of main character Abbie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), around whose cancer diagnosis the film revolves. ![]() There aren’t a lot of movies that reveal their own endings quite as speedily as Irreplaceable You, the Valentine’s Day–adjacent heartbreaker released last week on Netflix. ![]()
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