Irreplaceable You (2018)

There is a particular kind of Netflix romantic weepie that arrives without fanfare and departs without a trace, and Irreplaceable You occupies that space with quiet dignity. Stephanie Laing directs from a screenplay by Bess Wohl, and the pairing of two women at the helm of a story about a dying woman arranging her fiancé's next romance carries a certain structural logic. The film treats Abbie's terminal diagnosis as an opportunity for agency rather than pure victimhood, which is a modest advance for the genre. It is also, it should be said, still a film in which the dying woman's final project is the emotional rehabilitation of a man who cannot operate a dating app. The progressive content here is architectural, not thematic: a woman behind the camera, a woman writing the script, a woman making decisions for a man who will outlive her. Whether that constitutes a feminist statement or simply a well-organized funeral is a question the film declines to entertain.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw anchors the film with a performance of real warmth, and the casting of a Black actress in a role that requires nothing of her race is the sort of colorblind studio practice that reads as either enlightened or evasive depending on the hour of the day. The supporting ensemble is admirably varied, populated by the kinds of faces one sees in hospital waiting rooms, and none of them are asked to explain themselves. The film is content to let diversity simply exist, unremarked and untheorized, which is its own quiet position. Race, class, climate, and the entire apparatus of contemporary social concern are absent from this narrative. Nobody is lectured. Nobody is corrected. The characters are too busy dying and matchmaking to attend to structural critique.

The result is a film that wants tears and gets a few, mostly through sheer duration of suffering. Its messaging, such as it is, arrives through melodrama rather than sermon, which is the more tolerable delivery method. We are told to live fully, but we are told it by a woman who does not, and the film has the good sense to sit with that irony instead of resolving it. It is a modest, soft-spoken picture, and its cultural footprint is appropriately faint. The sommelier would note a thin body, low tannins, and a finish that evaporates before the credits finish rolling.