Writer-director Daniel Levy’s Netflix film Good Grief is a testimony to the complexities of grief. More than that, it’s also a reflection on the received wisdom of grieving and how we function beyond it, or more importantly, with it. Too often, we’re told that grief is a cry-it-out at the funeral scene and a bounce back to life. In Good Grief, we sit in the longer reach and the messier side of loss that we rarely discuss. Grief is often quieter, but more long-reaching than we’re told it should be. We’re asked to put it away neatly after a time when it sits long after the fact, or doesn’t even begin to take hold until long after the fact.
That Good Grief centres on a full year of this loss really speaks to that. Usually, we’d be looking at a story of “healing” and “moving on” more quickly. Instead, Levy shows his widower character Marc fully “stuck” in a version of grief for that whole year. In fact, he doesn’t start to grieve until the end of the film, over a year later. When he’s painting again, he has moved out of the house. That is the actual start, not the limbo in between. We often expect people to get through grief at double speed so we can all return to our lives, move on, and file the discomfort away. When it is, obviously, rarely that simple.
What is also not that simple is our relationship with the dead, because our relationship with the person who dies doesn’t actually end with them. That is the problem. We still exist, and so does the version of them we knew. In the film, Marc describes the physiology of brain chemistry in remembering the person; we can’t rewire our brains overnight for loss and nor should we. And yet, that’s usually what we’re expected to do. Added to that, if our relationship with the person who dies was complicated, it remains so after they’ve gone.
You can be angry at someone who died, not for dying but for what they did while they were alive. Both things can be true. In Levy’s story, Marc is hurt both by Luke Evans’ character Oliver’s actions and by his death. It’s confusing, messy, and complicated because those things are. This isn’t, as it turns out, some simple story of losing a loved one or a partner, grieving them and moving on. It’s about grieving the version you that thought you had and the life you could have had. It’s being angry and upset and sad that they died, but also incredibly angry at them.
Marc’s most searingly perfect expression of this is how badly he wants that fight with Oliver. Actually, it’s easier to reconcile the words of love unsaid, but harder to reconcile the words of anger, frustration, and even disappointment left unsaid. It’s easy to pretend the dead hear us when we say we love them and when we say nice things about them after they’re gone. It’s more complicated to argue with the dead. It’s not impossible with some imagination, but it’s harder. Closure so often isn’t about the good things but the uncomfortable ones.
I think about this often. Almost twenty years after my own father died, I rehash old teenage arguments and think about saying things or unsaying things. But usually, I do not regret the words said in anger but regret the things unsaid. Not standing up for what I believed in, to counter a point, or just to have the damn argument. As Marc does in the film, I so badly find myself wanting to say, “These are the ways you hurt me”, not to hurt back, but to simply have that argument, to let it be known, to speak the truth to that person in the hope that they understand. But once they’re gone, they never will.
In another story, Marc’s grief and his complex wrestling with his relationship with Oliver might be moralized. If they’d played by traditional rules, they would be in a good place. We’d condemn Oliver for his actions and validate Marc in his grief. Instead, Levy leaves it open, unresolved, without blame. Because actually applying traditional rules to queerness in life and death doesn’t work.
It’s also unknown how that argument would have developed. In the same way, the film looks at how Oliver and Marc’s lives might have panned out. We tend to romanticize the “what could have been” and centre so much on the positive lives we might have lived with the person who has gone. But with Good Grief, Levy dares to ask, “What if what we missed wasn’t good”. And while there’s no doubt of the love between Oliver and Marc, the daring to ask the question of “what if the future was something else” is accurate and heartbreaking. I think of the friend who died, who I think of fondly, but the more real question should be; would our own lives have meant that we are not even friends anymore? The answer is maybe not. We have to enshrine the dead at the moment we lose them, but that doesn’t mean the “what if” isn’t actually a million other possibilities. Not every relationship that ends in a death is a relationship that would have stayed the course, or been uncomplicated, or painful in the future had the person lived. That’s a brutal reality to sit with, but an important one, because in death our relationships retain the complexities of life. One that reaches beyond the life that ends and onwards into the living.
What the film also raises is the web of grief. When Marc loses his husband, their friends lose a friend, but also they lose a couple, a constant in their lives and a version of Marc. First, grief should extend to the effect on friends; they lost someone important too. While naturally, we prioritize the partners and family of the person who dies, in Good Grief, there’s a subtle commentary that in the year following Oliver’s death, friends Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel) unravel as a result too. Yes, their lives were already chaotic, filled with trouble and issues, like most of our lives are at some point. Still, the story shows that rather than galvanizing us to change ourselves for the better, to “fix” what’s wrong, grief can unravel what was already spiralling. And the fact that they suffer while their friend doesn’t notice because he’s locked in his grief, while they don’t notice because they are focusing on pulling him through, building their nest as Sophie says, they’re actually masking the impact that Olvier’s death has had on their own lives.
It’s a particularly queer approach because the loss affects a chosen family. A story that most straight filmmakers would be unlikely to think to validate. Loss limited to those bonded by blood or marriage is the narrative of grief we tend to get. In Levy’s queer understanding of it, why wouldn’t the friends, the extended chosen family, feel the ramifications of that loss just as deeply? Why would their loss not also be significant, if different, to Marc’s?
Coupled with that, they also lose a friend in Marc. Not intentionally, not entirely, but they lose a version of the Marc they knew when Oliver dies. And to a degree, they will never get that friend back either, and that’s something to be mourned. The Marc that comes out of that moment, that they see through that year, and who ultimately comes out on the other side isn’t the same. To a degree, Sophie and Thomas lose a friend to grief, and they don’t get the same one back. The absolute honesty that Marc might lose his friends to the process of grief is real. Everyone in our lives won’t stay the course of significant life changes. Not everyone’s relationship will survive that, and there is a different kind of grief, too. Ultimately, Levy offers a hopeful version of this: the three friends evolve through their collective grief and change for the better, the better for themselves. In part, it’s about growing up and evolving. With loss comes change; with change comes pain and shifts in dynamics.
The secondary, perhaps overlooked conversation about Levy’s film is about queer grief. It is rare that we get to see queer grief outside of politicized narratives. Those narratives are essential and we must continue to tell those stories. But this story of queer death, that isn’t connected to queerness explicitly, is equally powerful. In simply existing, in simply allowing us as queer people to see a queer story of loss and mourning in ordinary terms, is significant, and in its own way, political.
Historically, as queer people, we have not been permitted public grief or grief through our art; at least not art designed for mass consumption. We were allowed to write our stories of loss for the community and for the community alone. Hidden in specialized bookshops, on VHS tapes, or late at night on TV. Or in veiled art in specific galleries. But a mainstream film that simply foregrounds a queer experiences has been, until recent years, a rarity. And when given that opportunity, storytellers have felt pressured to foreground the positive queer experience. In being given a seat at the table, we figured it better not to bring the party down by talking about the problematic things. Or there’s been so much suffering anyway in the community that we don’t want to talk about it anymore. But in fact, taking that seat at the table, having the difficult conversations, talking about the uncomfortable things, like grief through a queer lens, is vital because we haven’t been able to do it before.
Previously, a story like Oliver and Marc’s would be played out in private. Marc would have been a “friend” and a “roommate” at the funeral. His friends, would have talked about it, but only in private. Marc would not have been able to have grieved publicly. There would have been no “good grief”. The profoundly personal is, for a marginalised group, often deeply political. For generations of queer people, their loss, just like love, was something to be hidden; so the simple act of telling this story feels incredibly powerful.
In offering us a complicated queer story of love and loss, Levy doesn’t “sanitize” anything or moderate it for a straight audience. It’s something he hinted at subtly in Schitt’s Creek. He’s not interested in pandering to the heteronormative versions of queer relationships that mainstream media expects. In Good Grief, he unapologetically presents an open queer marriage in all its messy reality. The fact that this this non-monogamous non-heteronormative relationship simply exists and isn’t justified or explained, is a real thing of queer beauty. The film isn’t about interrogating that; it’s a component of it, as are the queer characters who have casual sex, take drugs, and aren’t settled down at 35 with a house and a dog. The queer characters are a mix of human characters at different stages of life who have, we assume, different relationships with their own queerness and different boundaries and approaches to life. It’s subtle, yet wholly refreshing, to not be presented with a simple, heteronormative, homogenous version of what queerness looks like today.
Levy’s story also tells us that change after loss is OK. This film was partly inspired by his own losses in recent years, and as we all get older and loss becomes a more significant part of our lives, changing is inevitable. Even when the usual narrative is, we should bounce back or find another something to fill that void. Sometimes, the answer is to change because we have been changed. And that is a testament to the impact of who we have lost. Marc doesn’t change everything in his life, just what needs to chnage. Grief, loss, and change go hand in hand. The fact that the film doesn’t say “rewrite your life if you lose someone” but more “rediscover who you are without them” feels like a powerful lesson on sitting with who we are without the ones we love.
Marc comes out changed, not “for the better”, just better equipped for the future. Changed, by grief, he’s different. Levy chose to show that through Marc’s art. When Theo (Arnaud Valois) shows Marc Monet’s Water Lilies, he talks of how Monet chose to paint through grief and pain. While Marc once ran from it, hid from it, in painting he chooses to finally sit in that loss. The paintings reflect the versions of loss; from his husband to the friends in the life he used to have, to his mother, to the stranger in front of the waterlilies. The grief becomes less encompassing, and not all of it is sad. It’s possible to mourn aspects of your life—the version of the friends you once had—while embracing what they are now, what they could be. You can mourn even the moment in time with a stranger in a museum and celebrate what it now means in your life. Not all loss has to stay as pain. Sitting with that grief, painting through it in Marc’s case, becomes a means to exist with it, if not celebrate it, make something of it, move with it in the world.
We all choose how to move in the world with our grief. Like Levy, I write through it to the point that there’s a running joke. One day, I’ll write something where nobody dies. But Levy’s film, felt like a validation of that. Choosing to move through variations of grief, of navigating what that looks like in the world, using the thing that lets you sit in it; be that words, or art, or cooking, or whatever helps you through. It is essential that we all find ways to sit with and move through the art we make.
By Emily Garside
Good Grief is streaming worldwide on Netflix. Read our exclusive Good Grief interviews.
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