Delayed Reaction: Irreplaceable You

Premise: A woman dying of cancer tries to find a woman for her fiancé to be with after she dies.

 

The premise of this movie is so baffling that it's hard to move past it. Like Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character, its heart is in the wrong place, but it requires a character to charge directly into an awful decision for so long that I can't connect with it at all.

 

Mbatha-Raw has been dating Michiel Huisman since they were kids. They are deeply in love. When she finds out she has terminal cancer, her method of coping is becoming obsessed with making sure Huisman moves on and finds the right woman. Nearly every character tells her this is a horrible idea, but she keeps up with it anyway. Things go predictably wrong.

I see the bones of a sweet idea here. It's a bittersweet idea: trying to roll a doomed romance, losing a love one, and trying to move on all into one story. It's got P.S. I Love You vibes that are irresistible. I don't begrudge them for trying. If they pulled this off, it would be a devastating classic of the genre that people would discover for years. That it fails is evidence of how incredibly hard it is to pull off.

 

Mbatha-Raw plays the character well, especially in the moments not about her quest to find a replacement girlfriend. Huisman seems a bit miscast as the boyfriend. Both of them are a little too gorgeous to be this bashful about dating. At least she's dying though. They try to She's All That Huisman with a pair of glasses and have Brian Tyree Henry tell him how useless he is with women. It doesn't track. The cast of this movie is really freaking stacked. Everyone is a name or at least a face. I'd love to know the story here. Does director Stephanie Laing have a lot of friends? Is this a Netflix pull thing (although I'm pretty sure they just distributed it and had nothing to do with the production)? None of the producers jump out as connected people. There's a story here, and the Wikipedia page isn't detailed enough to tell it.

 

In the end, this is a noble failure that I commend. It's still sweetly romantic at times and a kick in the balls in places that are undeniable. It's just effective enough to ruin my afternoon, although the best version of this could've ruined my week.

 Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend