Banderas' 'Up Against It' Buries Its Own Tough Questions — SkimNews
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- "Up Against It", directed by Trudie Styler, follows divorced classical musician Alvaro (Antonio Banderas) and paralegal Saffron (Eva Birthistle) after their 14-year-old daughter Rose's (Eden Hamilton) long-dormant cancer returns.
- Rose's relapse sets up a stem-cell-donor dilemma in which doctors suggest creating a biological "savior sibling" — a premise the review says the film "only fleetingly engages with" as either serious subject or comedic material.
- Forest Whitaker plays the "conscientious, amusingly monotone" Dr. Abara, while Arinzé Kene is Saffron's psychiatrist fiancé Kingsley and Úrsula Corberó is Banderas' younger cellist girlfriend Lara, the other woman in the original marriage.
- Eden Hamilton's "boisterous, me-against-the-world" turn is described as the film's "backbone" — until Rose becomes "vestigial to her own cancer drama" as the narrative shifts to her parents.
- Banderas and Birthistle deliver what the review calls a "moving, realistic center" when the film focuses on the ex-spouses, but scenes "move on too quickly," with several punchier lines flagged as the product of "haphazard ADR."
- Storylines the film brushes aside include Rose's apparent crush on her stepbrother-to-be and a phone-number exchange between Kingsley and Lara that never leads to a one-on-one scene, per the review.
- The verdict: "wonderful performances and intriguingly modern ideas" undermined by clumsy assembly — a film with "much to enjoy, but just as much that lands with an awkward thud."
Why it matters: The review's central tension is that "Up Against It" builds its drama around a bioethically loaded "savior sibling" premise, then declines to mine it — turning a thorny modern medical-ethics question into a background device while the film rushes past its own strongest material toward parent-focused melodrama.
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