Sunny Dancer

The structural gamble is the one you notice first. Jaques keeps the film entirely inside a Scottish summer camp and cuts away from illness altogether. There are no hospital corridors, no drip stands, no bedside vigils. The disease recedes so the kids can be kids, and for long stretches the movie plays as a hang-out picture with unusually high stakes humming underneath. A fairground excursion turns confrontational when locals harass the group and Archie throws a punch on Ella's behalf. A talent-show finale sends Ivy dancing to the Scissor Sisters while her friends roar. The mode is loose, boisterous, a little hammy on purpose.

Bella Ramsey holds it together. The arc asks them to start confrontational and closed and to open by degrees into something both funnier and rawer, and Ramsey navigates the swing without ever tipping into sentiment. It is a performance forceful enough to paper over a good deal of the machinery around it. Neil Patrick Harris, as camp lead Patrick, does the harder work of a supporting turn: he sidesteps the two obvious adult templates, the cool grown-up and the out-of-touch dork, and instead carries a grief of his own that surfaces in sudden empochies and sudden outbursts. One late scene of his lands with real force.

Oliver Loncraine's camera stays restless, reframing the ensemble from fresh angles so the group never settles into a static portrait, and Caitlin Spiller's editing keeps the first half moving at a clip. The recurring needle drop of 'I Don't Feel Like Dancin'' becomes a motif the film leans on hard. Whether that repetition builds warmth or merely insists on it is a fair question, and one worth carrying into the second hour, where the energy of the opening gives way to more familiar rhythms and the cutting occasionally stutters the momentum it worked to build.

Jaques is 25, and the film wears both his gifts and his greenness. He wrote it out of proximity to real illness, and that shows in a refusal to treat these teenagers as objects of pity; they talk about death and bodies with a bluntness the subgenre rarely allows. It also shows in the occasional lurch into a register that strains to sound young and lands slightly off. This is not a clean film. It is a live one. The comedy is broad, the emotion is unguarded, and the climax makes a structural bet that will thrill some viewers and leave others cold.

Critics split hard on this movie, and the split is honest. If you want your cancer drama controlled and earned, the tonal swings here may read as unruly. If you can meet a film on the terms it sets, Sunny Dancer offers a ragged, warm ensemble picture carried by a lead performance worth the ticket. It reaches for buoyancy over gravity, and mostly gets there.

Now the open floor, and the thing everyone argues about: the third-act reveal.

Here is the mechanism. The talent-show finale plays as triumph, Ivy dancing while her people cheer, and the film immediately undercuts it with a therapy scene. In Patrick's office, Ivy spots a photo of Jake on the wall and breaks down as she realises Jake died of a heart attack. His return to camp, the boy she fell for, the island survival trip where they slept together, all of it she imagined. The love story was grief wearing a face.

I think this is the whole film in one move, and I think it divides people for a reason that isn't really about craft. Peter Bradshaw reads it as a smart misdirection-twist, and the case is strong: if you accept the fantasy, the buoyancy of the first two acts becomes retroactively load-bearing rather than merely charming. The joy wasn't avoidance. It was the shape grief took. Wendy Ide makes the adjacent point that Ramsey is so emotionally forceful in the collapse that the question marks around the reveal barely register in the moment.

The dissent is just as coherent. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh found the contrived climax left her manipulated and dry-eyed, and I understand the objection completely. A twist that reframes an entire romance as imagined is a big ask, and if the misdirection reads as withheld information rather than earned interiority, the whole thing curdles into a trick. David Jenkins comes at it from another angle, calling the film too soft a take on a hard subject and giving it 2/5, and Oscar Aitchison goes further, condemning the script as messy and cringey and the needle drops as manufactured warmth. That last charge is the one I keep turning over. The Scissor Sisters cue really does get deployed as an emotional lever, and once you notice the lever you can't unsee it.

Where I land: the misdirection works, but only because of the wall it's built on, and that wall is Ramsey. Strip the performance out and I suspect the reveal collapses into exactly the manipulation its detractors describe. The film is dangerously dependent on one actor selling a swing the script writes cheques it can't quite cash on its own. That's a real fragility, not a hedge.

If I were cutting this, I'd start in the second half. The consensus that the opening crackles and the back end drifts into familiar cancer-drama territory is, I think, correct, and some of that is structural but some is just rhythm. There are beats after the fairground where Spiller's cutting interrupts the momentum instead of driving it, and a leaner final third would have let the reveal hit harder because the audience would arrive at it with more velocity. The film drags precisely where it most needs to accelerate.

One more thing I'd defend against the harshest readings. The decision to exclude every hospital scene is not evasion. It's the film's thesis about where these kids live, and it's the reason the imagined-romance structure is even possible; a movie that showed us the ward couldn't sustain the fantasy. Jaques bet the whole picture on keeping us at camp, and structurally it's the smartest thing he does. Jack Martin's read of the film as an endearing hang-out movie where cancer recedes so the characters' spirit can shine is the frame that unlocks it for me. Take it on those terms and the flaws stay flaws, but they stop being fatal.

It's uneven. It's occasionally green. It leans on a song and a lead performance harder than a tighter film would. And I'd still send people to it, because the highs are specific and hard-won and the central swing, for all its risk, comes from a real place. A first feature this alive with a second act this shaky is a filmmaker worth following.