Goodbye June Review: Kate Winslet’s Directing Debut is a Well-Meaning Misfire

If you read the headline of this review and are shocked that this is the first time you’re hearing that not only did Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet direct a movie, but it’s being released right now and in two weeks will be streaming globally on Netflix, you’re likely not alone. An actor with a pedigree such as Winslet making their first move into the director’s chair would normally come with enough pomp and circumstance to achieve a big film festival premiere, likely at a Sundance or TIFF—or if you’re Scarlett Johansson, Harris Dickinson, or Kristen Stewart earlier this year, the loftiest of positions at Cannes. At worst, if you’re an actor of even the most marginal acclaim, you can at least count on a premiere at Tribeca before your film maybe gets a general release two years later. 

Perhaps it was writing on the wall, then, that Winslet’s debut with Goodbye June skipped attempts at garnering any awards buzz via a premiere at one of the numerous fall festivals, instead being wholly dumped by Netflix as a quiet also-ran while their glut of contenders pick up nominations left and right. It’s an ignominious rollout for a fairly forgettable feature, but ultimately, Goodbye June’s biggest crime is simply that you won’t remember it within an hour of the credits finishing. Taking place entirely within the walls of a hospital, mostly within the room of family matriarch June (Helen Mirren), the film concerns her four adult children (Winslet, Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough, Johnny Flynn) and cantankerous husband (Timothy Spall) coming to terms with the diagnosis of June’s cancer returning in rapid fashion, with the doctors stating she likely won’t make even last the two weeks to Christmas. 

There are some potent ideas at play here, including a Christmas setting that should be filled with cheer but is instead draped in a dreary grey palette within these hospital walls and the muted cinematography of Alwin H. Küchler. Winslet explores how this family attempts to cope with the brutal reality that sometimes there is no more reason for even trying treatment—all you can do is make a loved one as comfortable as possible with what little time they have left. There’s a bitter honesty to that which we aren’t often confronted with in a world where stories try to give us some way out, some bit of hope. But Goodbye June can’t tackle this material with the same kind of dimensionality present in, say, Tamara Jenkins’ superb The Savages. 

Written by Joe Anders (Winslet’s son with ex-husband Sam Mendes) when he was just 19 years old, it’d be a stretch to call Goodbye June a vanity project, yet it is hampered tremendously by a surface-level approach to its characters and themes. He was inspired to write the script after their family endured the passing of Anders’ grandmother, Winslet’s mother, but none of that profound personal experience translates into a film that feels built from a template of cliches and conventions. Each of the siblings is captured in one-dimensional stock archetypes: Johnny Flynn is the sensitive younger brother who has panic attacks; Andrea Riseborough is the hothead who flies off the handle; Toni Collette is the hippie black sheep who no one has heard much from in ages; Kate Winslet is the one trying to hold it all together, the burden of that weight wearing her down more and more each day. Anyone could have written this story, and you know exactly where these dynamics are all leading to, as each scene exists in one register that drives us towards an inevitable conclusion. 

Despite the stacked cast of heavy hitters in the cast, the standout of the ensemble is little-known Fisayo Akinade as one of the hospital nurses. In the film’s most compelling scene, Akinade shares a moment with Flynn’s character where the nurse recalls how his mother died when he was young and he wasn’t there. All he wishes was that he could have seen it coming so he could spend those last days with her. “I make it my duty to make sure people get good goodbyes,” he says. It’s a heartfelt moment with the kind of genuine humanity that’s sorely lacking in the rest of the picture. 

Goodbye June opens in select theaters on December 12 before streaming on Netflix starting December 24.