Last gasp: "More Than Ever"

First, some notably sad extratextual business: nobody would have wanted this to be the case, but Emily Atef's More Than Ever marks one of the final screen appearances of Gaspard Ulliel, the French actor who died in a skiing accident last January, aged 37. It would be an emotional experience even without the closing-credit dedication "Pour Gaspard", because Atef's film happens to describe a sort-of love triangle where one of the points isn't going to be there for long: as we meet her, heroine Hélène (Vicky Krieps) has just been diagnosed with an incurable lung disease. While her docs work on the possibility of a life-saving transplant, her friends - busy making plans and babies - don't know what to say around her. By contrast, her other half Matthieu (Ulliel) leans towards saying and doing too much, forever jollying Hélène along so he can pretend things are as normal as they can be. What Hélène seeks, we quickly intuit, is someone prepared to acknowledge the reality of her situation - sombre, even grave though that is. A wits-end Google search for (nice, believable touch, this) "what do people do when they're dying" steers her to a Norwegian photoblogger who spends his days chronicling his own ups and downs with cancer. She's soon smitten, and I can't say how reassuring you'll find the moral of her story, which is this: no matter that the other organs may have more pressing - indeed, in Hélène's case, life-or-death - concerns, the heart retains priority, selfish to the last.

Some comfort can at least be drawn from the effort this intelligent, handsome film makes to see and dramatise all sides - to realise this is a difficult if not dire situation, and that everybody caught up in it has their own ways of coping. After last month's Corsage, it's another opportunity for we latecomers to study what others have admired in the newly eminent Krieps, and again she reveals herself as a close-knit, precise performer, blessed with unusually expressive locks (her characters visibly unravel, from the head down) and a general translucency: she looks legitimately weary, as if she has no more blood to give and sorely needs a lie down. (Here, she also gets to play a scene I can't remember seeing before: the attempted seduction derailed by a deathly coughing fit.) The more I see of Krieps, the more I understand how she represents a very familiar modern archetype: The Woman Who Wants to be Left Alone (But Just Can't Help Herself). She's a Garbo who signed up for Twitter, keeping her DMs locked (for now). Ulliel's Matthieu at least makes the mistakes he makes out of love, a need to keep his beloved close for as long as he humanly can; we understand why he's taken aback when Hélène announces she's heading off to Norway on her lonesome, but we also can't help but notice his way of making the conversation about himself. Granted, the character also benefits from the doubt the opening act casts over this triangle's third party. The blogger's most popular post involves an artfully posed shot of a handsome young man with his bum hanging out of his hospital gown, a morbid thirst trap; yet when Hélène reaches out to her new online friend via Zoom, he's unable to appear, claiming his camera is broken. When a middle-aged, craggy-faced fellow called Bent (Bjørn Floberg) picks Hélène up from the ferry, installing her in a dingy boathouse with no WiFi, we might wonder why our heroine doesn't immediately turn on her heel and retreat to safety. Then again, we might rationalise - as Hélène surely rationalises - that at this point she has nothing very much to lose.

It's testament to the involving work Atef and Krieps do in that first hour that we stick around to see where all this is headed, for better or worse. The trajectory isn't so far removed from an Eat Pray Love-like voyage of self-discovery: Bent the Blogger's getaway lines the shore of an especially picturesque fjord, and there's some (literal) light comedy as our heroine struggles to get a decent night's sleep this close to the Arctic Circle. (Floberg, a veteran of 1997's original Insomnia, has no such issue.) Yet Atef staves off any vapidity via a Hansen-Løve-like equanimity; as Hélène puts it, during a FaceTime confession to an understandably rattled Matthieu, "It's weird: I'm sick, but I feel good at the same time". Within the film, such positive vibes have to be weighed against a discomfiting irony: that this adventurer is discovering herself perilously late in the day. Second-act Hélène snaps to - the bracing air and icy water reawakens something in her - but her newfound independence looks a horribly Pyrrhic gain when she's stranded on a mountaintop and coughing up blood. (Again: Krieps does not strike the eye as one of the cinema's more robust dead women walking.) Some of the conventional melodrama lurking within this premise rears its head in the final act once Matthieu, too, takes the ferry and re-enters the frame in person. (There may be no getting away from it, whatever altitude your film hikes towards.) But Atef and co-writer Lars Hubrich have clearly thought long and hard about not just their characters' narrative arcs but death itself - a process that imbues each gesture here, and especially those of the gorgeously choreographed final moments, with an appreciable depth and weight. Death's spectre may pull our living selves in radically different, unexpected directions, but even within the endgame there are still decisions and choices to be made. To the very last, it's your own time you may be wasting.

More Than Ever is now showing in selected cinemas, and streaming via Curzon Home Cinema, HOME Manchester and the BFI Player.