"I Am Breathing" (The Guardian 21/06/13)

I Am Breathing (uncertificated) 72 mins ***

This sobering documentary stands as a memorial to Neil Platt, a Harrogate-based architect and new father who, at 33, was diagnosed with debilitating and terminal Motor Neurone Disease: we’re essentially watching a man disappear before our eyes. The directors’ intimate domestic images only occasionally match the humour and ruminative poetry of their subject’s own, blog-published words, but ghoulishness and undue sentimentality are kept at bay: one last, quiet peek around the subject’s bedroom very movingly suggests what has been lost. The running time perhaps does the greatest justice to Neil Platt’s life: it feels nowhere near long enough. 

I Am Breathing opens in selected cinemas from today.