Miss You Already, Surprisingly, is a tale of two lifelong friends who have never left each other sides which isn’t as humdrum and mundane as you would expect! With Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore taking the helm as mentioned best friends, this will tug at the heartstrings as well as make you laugh and smile.
Miss You Already tells the story of how Milly (Collette) and Jess (Barrymore) have been friends since Milly dug Jess out of a tough spot when transferring to a new school from America, Experiencing everything together from first loves, losing their virginity, pregnancy and everything else in between the pair have been absolutely inseparable. Now both in their 30’s the woman have their own struggles which push their friendship to the limit. In fact, it’s Milly, who is the loud, attention loving vain one that demands all the attention as she is diagnosed with Breast Cancer.
Whilst Milly is coping quite well with her illness as she goes through losing her hair through chemotherapy, Jess and her partner, Paddy Considine, deal with their own issue of infertility and the longing to have a child. Thankfully, we aren’t subjected to the hour long story of the two girl’s life and how their relationship blossomed but thrown straight into the deep end with Milly’s cancer being revealed. The light-hearted script spends a refreshing amount of time on actually telling the story of how this cancer patient and those around her cope with her life-threatening disease, each stage from diagnosis, to explaining to her kids about cancer to the effects of chemo to her double mastectomy is met with a poignant, sensitive but humorous touch.
As the title suggests, Milly doesn’t survive her aggressive illness, knowing her own fate will take away her life prematurely and feeling undesirable to her husband Kit (Dominic Cooper) after having both her breasts removed she embarks on an affair with a man who makes her feel sexy again but when Jess stumbles on this betrayal their friendship is rocked to the core.
Toni Collette proves her worth time and time again, her performance is real and she digs deep into her character to make every second believable showing exactly how underrated an actress she really is. Barrymore’s vivaciousness shines through but it does seem like we have seen this character from her time and time again but they do work well together.
Director Catherine Hardwicke, who is known for Twilight and Thirteen, has taken an enormously brave and courageous leap with this story and has come up with a winning formula of approaching such a difficult and heartbreaking subject and turning it into a moving yet amusing film.
Miss You Already is out on Blu-ray and DVD 1st of February.