Ollie Gardner and Jake Harvey’s The State of Us takes an emotionally dangerous premise: a young man breaking his terminally ill best friend out of the hospice for one last night together, and wisely refuses to treat it as straightforward misery. Instead, it turns grief into something messy, funny, and defiantly alive.
At the centre are Frankie and Taylor, played by Samuel Bottomley and Callum Scott Howells, two friends whose relationship has been forced into an impossible position by Taylor’s illness. Frankie’s solution is characteristically reckless: get his mate out of the hospice and give him one final night of freedom. What begins as an escape becomes an increasingly complicated confrontation with everything the pair have avoided saying.
The most promising thing about the film is its attitude towards male friendship. Rather than making the relationship sentimental, Gardner and Harvey appear interested in the way young men actually communicate: through insults, jokes, bravado, shared stupidity, and the things they conspicuously don’t say. That makes the emotional material potentially much more affecting than a conventional cancer drama.
Bottomley is particularly well cast as Frankie. He has the capacity to make recklessness look simultaneously funny and slightly frightening, which is exactly what the character requires. Howells, meanwhile, brings a very different energy to Taylor: someone whose illness has made him physically vulnerable without necessarily diminishing his personality. Their chemistry is effectively the film’s engine.
The State of Us sounds superficially like a contemporary road movie, but the journey is really psychological: two friends racing against time. The Yorkshire setting and emphasis on a single chaotic night give it a grounded, recognisably British texture rather than the polished sentimentality of an American terminal-illness movie. It has the kind of premise that could have produced a relentlessly bleak film but instead seems determined to find life inside death.
The film is one of the ten world premieres competing for EIFF’s Sean Connery Prize, with the winner receiving £50,000. It screens again at the festival on 15, 16, and 18 August.
