There’s a certain allure to an established star trying their hand at directing. Kate Winslet has been a familiar face for decades now, and has started producing her projects, but Goodbye June is her first time in the director’s chair. This is a real opportunity to show us her artistic viewpoint with more than just her acting tools. Whatever the specifics of the project, the desire to know how she’ll use it is a draw in itself.
As it turns out, her instinct as a filmmaker is often what happens when an actor gets behind the camera: highlight her fellow actors. All of her intensely talented ensemble cast are gifted moments to be the center of audience attention. But despite how lovely that sounds, the material just isn’t strong enough to support that approach. The film struggles to lift its heavy subject matter and ends up static, proving neither as entertaining nor as meaningful as it had hoped to be.
Goodbye June’s Collection Of Talent Is Undone By A Simplistic Script
Goodbye June begins early one December morning, when the elderly June (Helen Mirren) struggles to breathe and collapses in her kitchen. Connor (Johnny Flynn), her youngest, who lives with her and his father Bernie (Timothy Spall), calls an ambulance and summons the rest of his difficult, disjointed family. Second-born Julia (Winslet) and her younger sister Molly (Andrea Riseborough) rush there, some of their children in tow. The eldest, Helen (Toni Collette), arrives last, having had to catch a flight from Germany.
June has been fighting cancer for a while, and it’s reached the point they’ve all feared. She will die sometime in the next few days; she may not make it to Christmas. As her gravity pulls all her children into one hospital room, they’re forced to contend with the issues that have kept them from gathering like this under less dire circumstances, and (hopefully) overcome them in time to give their matriarch a proper goodbye.
This is a textbook dysfunctional family – a bit too textbook. They each have their pain points, none greater than between Julia and Molly, who can barely stand being in the same space together. But these characters and their dynamics are all far too neatly defined. Connor is anxious and attentive, Julia successful and organized, Molly angry and alternative, and Helen flighty and spiritual. They each have their role to play in the family unit and hardly seem to exist outside of them.
This flattening isn’t always a problem in movies. Characters are constructs, not real people, and there’s no need for them to be realistic if they’re intended to serve a different purpose. In a Hollywood family drama with Christmas overtones, a little simplicity could’ve helped hit those tearjerker high notes. But Goodbye June doesn’t want to be that kind of movie. Its tone, the way it’s shot, and the lived-in detail of its production design all point toward something grounded and emotionally truthful, within which these characters go from simple to simplistic.
Having a cast this gifted doesn’t prove helpful. As a director, Winslet gives space to her actors, using the camera to pull our focus to the performances more often than to visual compositions. Because they are each given a “thing” to play, and we’re encouraged to spend our time watching them do that thing, these people begin to feel like caricatures. Given the emotions the film wants to explore, that just doesn’t land.
It would be unfair to assign blame to any one performance, or even to Winslet’s direction, when the script is the obvious culprit. Story or character hurdles are thrown up and surmounted with the same neatness, sapping them of their impact. The movie becomes so certain of its footing that the two-hour runtime starts to feel like a chore.
It’s hardly absent of value. Thematically, its heart is very much in the right place, and little moments or choices shine through here and there. It’s possible that a more visual approach may have helped the material, since when Winslet does pull back from her actors to present us with a frame, it does lend the film a slight charge. But a weak foundation is the hardest thing for any project to overcome. Ultimately, if it weren’t for that overlong feeling, this would make for inoffensive Christmastime viewing. But Netflix makes it too easy to act on one’s loss of patience, and I suspect many will.
- Release Date
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December 12, 2025
- Writers
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Joe Anders