Good Grief (2023) Review

When Marc’s husband dies unexpectedly his world is shattered and he must rely on his two best friends Sophie and Thomas for support, both with their own issues to try and deal with.

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Everything looks pretty perfect for Marc and Oliver, a couple very much in love and enjoying life together. A tragic acident sees Oliver die and Marc is left to deal with the grief felt by this, in the build up towards Christmas. We move forward a year which has not been a good one for Marc and as the first anniversary of the death approaches he eventually wants to open the Christmas Card that was left for him which he could not bring himself to do.

The contents of the card were not what he expected at all and changes everything he thought he knew about not only his husband but himself. I think that then made the grieving process a very tough thing to take all over again. With that he also found out that Oliver had a lease on an apartment in Paris which was about to run out, Marc sees this as an opportunity to take his friends on a trip but what he doesn’t tell them is about the double life Oliver had been living.

Good Grief is a rather intimate look at how different people deal with grief and the impact it can then have on those closest to them. When we go through loss it is quite impossible to really think about anyone or anything else and the person going through it becomes very self centred. Only because it consumes them too much, not that they don’t care about other people anymore.

Sophie and Thomas attempt to support Marc and in the end everything he goes through actually does impact the decisions they make when it comes to love and romance. Which I guess was quite a good thing, even if it did not feel like it to begin with.

Dan Levy wrote and directed the film as well as taking on the leading role, a film with Netflix from his production company. Following the success of Schitt’s Creek we are always going to be excited with what Levy is going to do next. The cast put together for this film was fantasric with Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel taking on the friends roles. Luke Evans doesn’t have much screen time given his role as Oliver but who else would have loved to have seen more between him and Levy? Celia Imrie has a scene stealing moment with a rather lovely little speech.