Then Came You (2018)

Then Came You arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in being anything other than what it is: a terminal-illness dramedy in which a young man afraid of dying learns to live from a young woman who is actually dying. The premise has been with us since at least the Reagan administration, and director Peter Hutchings does not trouble himself with reinvention. Asa Butterfield plays Calvin, a baggage handler at an upstate airport whose hypochondria is treated by the screenplay as a quirk to be cured. Maisie Williams plays Skye, the British teenager with a bucket list and a limited supply of time. They meet at a cancer support group. He is not supposed to be there. She knows this. They become friends anyway.

The film's cultural inventory is remarkably sparse. Skye drives the narrative with a bluntness that borders on rudeness, but the screenplay never frames her as a statement about anything. Calvin's family includes a Black sister-in-law and a Black boss, both of whom exist as people instead of as arguments. There is no sermonizing, no moment where a character turns to the camera to explain how we should feel about the world. The mechanics of dying are handled with the standard montage of small joys, and the film ends with birthday cards and an airplane, which is the genre's way of saying that life goes on.

We could call this a relic, though it was released in 2019, which suggests the relic was manufactured recently and shipped anyway. The result is a film of modest, unremarkable warmth, the kind we watch on an airplane and forget before the beverage service. It is not a failure of craft. It is a failure of ambition, which is a gentler crime. There is nothing here to classify, and the sommelier's glass remains, for once, entirely clear.