Mark Reviews Movies: HOPE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 15, 2021

Hope doesn't evade the tough questions, difficult conversations, and wrenching emotions of being or loving someone diagnosed with a terminal illness, but the illness and its effects aren't the core of Maria Sødahl's film. In it, a woman in her 40s learns that she has a brain tumor, which every doctor and specialist agrees will lead to her death. The only real medical question is how long that process will take. The only question for the woman, her long-term romantic partner, and her family is what they will do right now.

The drama here is in these relationships, primarily the one between Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig) and her older partner of decades Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård), and that urgency of the immediate. Things must be done, even though the diagnosis brings with it a lot of waiting. Plans must be made, even though there is primarily uncertainty in the news. People must be told, although the words will only bring pain, and wishes must be spoken, although Anja knows she will never know if they will be granted.

Sødahl's title seems counterintuitive to this material. Indeed, when one doctor finally agrees to speak with the couple about how to tell their children about the diagnosis, he suggests that Anja leaves the kids with a little more hope than she has. The only problem is that she has none. No one, she tells the doctor, has given her any reason to have hope.

There's even less hope as we start to learn more about the couple, their history, their present circumstances, and what might have become of their relationship, if Anja's health hadn't taken this path. She's a choreographer, who recently opened her first show in a country other than her native Norway. Anja has had some headaches recently, and they've only become worse.

Christmas is approaching, and while Tomas prepares his adult children from a previous marriage and his three kids with Anja for the holiday, she goes to the doctor. A scan shows a sizeable tumor on her brain. She had and has been in remission from lung cancer since last year. If the tumor is unrelated to that cancer, a surgeon might be able to remove it. If it's cancer that has spread from her lungs, there is almost certainly no hope for any kind of recovery, save for a miracle.

A somewhat odd moment between Anja and Tomas arrives when a doctor gives that diagnosis. Anja listens, with a reserved but pained look. Tomas begins to cry, holding his head in his hands. When Anja looks to him, though, there's almost a visage of confusion on her face. That single look tells us a lot of this couple, and the rest of the film continues to confirm our suspicions.

There's a lot of tension here, left mostly unspoken over the years, because neither of them has wanted to talk about it and both of them have more or less accepted this as the way of their relationship. Everyone can sense it. Before the two sit the family down to tell them about Anja's illness, her eldest, 16-year-old daughter Julie (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osbourne), assumes the news will be that her parents are going to split (Anja and Tomas aren't married, because, as they put it, life—and themselves—just kept getting in the way). The scene cements this idea of a kind of double melancholy in this relationship and home. Even under such strenuous and emotionally strained circumstances, no one assumes there's any bad news coming. This is just the way things have been between Anja and Tomas for as long as anyone can remember anymore.

There's no hope with Anja's diagnosis. There seems little hope for this couple, who continually seem to make some kind of breakthrough. Tomas finally leaves behind work to tend to Anja on her regular appointments and research alternative procedures or practices that might help. Anja finally voices some of the things that had been keeping her at an emotional distance from Tomas. For every step forward, though, there's another step or two in retreat—back toward the tension, the emotional stalemate, and the uncertainty, now spoken, that these two will have a future together, as little time as there may be left for them.

Sødahl digs into this tenuous bond, avoiding manipulation or melodrama. Secrets are admitted, such as an actual physical affair and one of the heart. Anja tells Tomas that she wants him to find a new partner after she dies, not because she wants him to be happy, but because she doesn't believe he has the capacity to care for the children on his own. That one cuts, although Tomas basically accepts it as the truth, just as he does when Anja says, as much as he pressured her to, she never loved his kids as much as she loves her own.

There's a blunt, naked honesty to these characters, now left with no reason to hide such matters, and these performances, too. Hovig plays an Anja filled with dread for what's to come, given a high from the steroids that are working to shrink the fluid around the tumor, and a newfound strength to say what needs to be said, while she still has the life to say it. Skarsgård's Tomas is a man suddenly confronted by regret and by a desire to make things right while he still has the time to do so.

The film is only superficially about death and dying. Sødahl keeps the focus on these lives, turned upside-down and gradually discovering a new perspective. There is, appropriately, hope by the end of Hope, but the struggle for these characters to find it is what matters.

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