Film Review: Good Grief is a thoughtful film that blends black humour and pathos

Good Grief is written and directed by Daniel Levy

Irish actress Ruth Negga (right) in understated drama ‘Good Grief’. Picture: Courtesy of Netflix © 2023

• Good Grief 
• ★★★★☆
• Netflix

Good Grief (15A) opens with the London-based art designer Marc (Daniel Levy) left devastated when his husband, the best-selling author Oliver (Luke Evans), is killed in a car accident.

Marc’s best friends Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel) cluster around with the best of intentions, but Marc discovers that grief is a path one must navigate alone, especially when he belatedly discovers that his husband wasn’t quite the man he believed him to be. Written and directed by Levy, Good Grief is a thoughtful film that blends black humour and pathos as Marc tries to come to terms with his loss.

Cynical and brittle, prickly and sentimental, Marc finds that his grief has become something of a battleground being fought over by Negga’s exuberant drama queen and the more soulful introspection espoused by Patel.

It’s a neatly crafted tale, and one that offers no easy answers when it comes to the big questions of love and death. The early observation that suggests art functions “as a commemoration of pain” sounds ominously grandiose, but Levy’s subdued, unshowy exploration of the prosaic nature of grief results in a poignantly understated drama.