Goodbye June
Kate Winslet makes her directorial debut with a comedy-drama kindled with sentimentality and wisdom.
Dying to connect: Helen Mirren and Kate Winslet
Image courtesy of Netflix.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
They say that Christmas is all about family – but families can be a nightmare. The opening beats of Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, Goodbye June, set up the tension nicely. Here the domestic front is a warzone and the odds are working against the Cheshire clan. Nana seems to be having a heart attack in the kitchen, and has left the kettle on the gas, Grandad is in the bathroom upstairs and has left the tap on, and their troubled son, Connor, is still in bed. Were this a thriller, this would be a pulse-accelerating scenario, deftly spliced together by Lucia Zucchetti’s rapid-fire editing. Statistically, most accidents happen in the home and it’s a wonder that more thrillers are not set there.
This, though, it not a thriller but a domestic comedy-drama all about family. Appropriately, then, the screenplay is penned by Kate Winslet’s own son Joe Anders, who took a screenwriting course at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and was encouraged to write something personal. While it’s not ostensibly autobiographical, there is an air of The Kate Winslet Show about it, with old friends and colleagues drafted in to play variations of England’s lower middle-class archetypes.
Kate herself plays the sensible, buttoned-up Julia, who would seem to have taken on the lioness’s share of the responsibilities for her dysfunctional dynasty. Her younger sister Molly (Andrea Riseborough) cuts a more unconventional figure, all home-knitted apparel and organic sandwiches, while Connor (Johnny Flynn) is a bundle of insecurities who cannot stop chewing his thumb to the bone. There’s another sister, too, the New Wave Helen (Toni Collette) who spreads her crystals and breathing techniques to those willing to pay for them over in Berlin. And then there’s their father Bernie (Timothy Spall), a monstrous figure with a liking for drink and crosswords, cursed with a recalcitrant leg which he once lost in a barge accident.
These are ‘characters’ writ large, with few striking similarities, a sort of pack of eccentrics escaped from the pages of a Mike Leigh script refashioned by Alan Bennett. But Kate Winslet’s direction is a thing of beauty, adroitly harnessing the dramatic highs and lows sparked with unexpected moments of comedy. The queen of the drama, though, is Helen Mirren as June, whose stage is a room at the Princess Mary Cheltenham Hospital and who appears to be on her last legs. Dame Helen is, of course, magnificent.
It is interesting that both Kate Winslet and Daniel Day-Lewis have recently starred in films penned by their sons, although Goodbye June is destined to appeal to a larger audience. The film is stuffed with wonderful moments but seems to lose its way after the halfway mark, as Joe Anders steers us to a somewhat inevitable finale with no real surprises. There will be tears, and there will be reconciliations, and the glutinous ending is maybe a sob too far.
Cast: Toni Collette, Johnny Flynn, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Spall, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Stephen Merchant, Fisayo Akinade, Jeremy Swift, Raza Jaffrey, James Trevelyan Buckle, Nancy Hannan, Michelle Parker.
Dir Kate Winslet, Pro Kate Winslet and Kate Solomon, Screenplay Joe Anders, Ph Alwin H. Küchler, Pro Des Alison Harvey, Ed Lucia Zucchetti, Music Ben Harlan, Costumes Grace Clark, Sound Ben Meechan.
55 Jugglers-Netflix.
114 mins. UK/USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 24 December 2025. Cert. 15.
