Miss You Already (2015)
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
No — Miss You Already is not especially woke, scoring 21 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
There is a particular subgenre of British tearjerker in which two women love each other with a devotion that outlasts their husbands, and Miss You Already occupies that territory with the grim professionalism of a caterer who has done a hundred of these weddings.
Consciousness Markers
The film centers female friendship, women's health, and a woman's experience of mastectomy and body image, but frames these as personal drama rather than a feminist thesis.
Two white female leads anchor the film, with a woman director and a small amount of incidental background diversity; casting is female-forward but not a deliberate diversity statement.
Milly's struggle with her appearance after a double mastectomy touches on body image and self-acceptance, though it is treated as personal vanity and grief rather than a body-positivity platform.
Jess is described as an environmentalist and Jago works on an oil rig, but these are passing character details rather than a climate message.
The film aims for tears rather than sermons, delivering its emotional beats through melodrama rather than preachy messaging.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear anywhere in the story.
No engagement with race or racial identity; the cast and story are uniformly unconcerned with racial themes.
No critique of wealth, class, or capitalism; the oil rig is a plot device for a paycheck, not a political statement.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
No historical revisionism; the film is a contemporary personal drama.
Why it received this score
There is a particular subgenre of British tearjerker in which two women love each other with a devotion that outlasts their husbands, and Miss You Already occupies that territory with the grim professionalism of a caterer who has done a hundred of these weddings. Catherine Hardwicke directs from Morwenna Banks's screenplay, itself expanded from a BBC Radio 4 play, and the machinery is well oiled: Milly (Toni Collette) receives a cancer diagnosis, Jess (Drew Barrymore) receives a pregnancy, and the two spend ninety minutes trading bad news at the worst possible moments. The film is competently made and frequently moving, in the manner of a well-timed punch to the sternum.
The picture is female-forward in its casting and its concerns, though it wears this lightly. Both leads are women, the director is a woman, the writer is a woman, and the central subject is the female body under siege, first from chemotherapy, then from a double mastectomy, then from an affair with a barman that Milly chases to West Yorkshire under the pretext of literary tourism. Body image arrives as theme without becoming platform. Milly mourns her reflection because she is vain and frightened, not because the film has an argument to make about representation. The environmentalism of Jess and the oil rig employment of her husband Jago are passing details, plot furniture to explain an absence and a paycheck. No sermon is delivered on either subject.
What we have instead is melodrama executed with sincerity, and sincerity is its own sort of labor. The film wants your tears and is not ashamed to say so, which is more honest than most of its peers. There are no LGBTQ characters, no racial themes, no neurodivergent figures, no revisionist history, and no critique of capital. There is a woman dying and a woman holding her hand. That is the entire transaction. It is not nothing. It is simply not a manifesto, and the film has no interest in pretending otherwise.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
The friendship between two life-long girlfriends is put to the test when one starts a family and the other falls ill.
Questions about Miss You Already
Is Miss You Already woke?
No — Miss You Already is not especially woke, scoring 21 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does Miss You Already have any woke elements?
2 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Feminist Agenda (42) and Representation Casting (30). On Feminist Agenda: The film centers female friendship, women's health, and a woman's experience of mastectomy and body image, but frames these as personal drama rather than a feminist thesis.
How does Miss You Already compare to other 2015 movies?
It ranks #68 of the 289 films from 2015 we've scored; their average is 15. The wokest is Chi-Raq (78).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.