Coming-of-age films live or die on a single question: do the relationships feel real? George Jaques’s Sunny Dancer, which opened the Generation 14plus section at this year’s Berlinale, clears that hurdle within its first twenty minutes and never looks back, delivering the best teen ensemble drama I’ve seen since Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s The Kings of Summer. It’s anchored by a career-best performance from Bella Ramsey, showcasing a range that extends well beyond their best-known roles in Game of Thrones and The Last of Us.
Ivy (Ramsey) is seventeen, ten months into remission from leukemia, and thoroughly uninterested in performing gratitude for an audience that wants her survival story packaged with a bow. Her parents (Jessica Gunning and James Norton, both funny in limited screen time) worry that their daughter has retreated so far inward she might never find her way back out, so they ship her off to Children Run Free, a four-week program in the Scottish Highlands designed for teenagers recovering from cancer; or as Ivy calls it with appropriate disdain, “chemo camp.”
If you’re expecting a weepy experience akin to something like The Fault in Our Stars, I’ll advise that you adjust your expectations immediately. Jaques takes a fundamentally different approach to the subject matter, one that’s far more interested in joy than tragedy, and the film stays miles away from sterile hospital rooms; nearly the entire runtime unfolds at the camp itself, against the backdrop of Scotland’s gorgeous Highland scenery. But what sets Sunny Dancer further apart is a willingness to lean into dry, dark, distinctly British humor: these kids crack jokes about their illnesses with the sort of gallows humor almost guaranteed to make “polite society” deeply uncomfortable, and this somehow makes the weightier emotional material more palatable — likely because the film doesn’t flinch away from these moments.
The ensemble is uniformly excellent, led by Ruby Stokes as Ivy’s perpetually horny roommate, whose relentless pursuit of losing her virginity provides some of the film’s biggest laughs. Stokes knows exactly when to lean into the comedy and when to pull back, and there’s something refreshing about watching a female character be this openly obsessed with sex in a genre that typically reserves this for the boys. Daniel Quinn-Toye brings a dreamy quality to Jake, whose budding romance with Ivy unfolds with a nervous sort of sweetness over the course of the four-week program, while Earl Cave (looking so much like his father Nick that it’s almost distracting) plays Ralph as the group’s designated purveyor of pitch-black comedy.
Neil Patrick Harris appears as Patrick, the camp’s relentlessly upbeat director, and what seems at first to be a one-note caricature evolves into something unexpectedly touching. Harris initially plays Patrick as exactly the type of aggressively cheerful adult you’d expect at a camp like this, complete with khaki shorts and corny slogans and manufactured enthusiasm. But Jaques peels back layers as the film progresses, and when Patrick finally shares his own history, Harris shifts into a register of quiet devastation that absolutely floored me.
But this is Ramsey’s show, and they absolutely deliver. Ivy isn’t a hero or a warrior or any of the other labels that get slapped onto cancer survivors to make everyone else feel better about mortality. Instead, she’s pissed off, isolated, and deeply resistant to the notion that surviving means she owes the world anything resembling inspiration. There’s a scene early in the film where Ivy publicly dresses down a social media influencer who shows up at camp to harvest content from other people’s trauma that’s not only hilarious, but also feels especially honest about the way society treats illness as performance art for the healthy.
One of the film’s greatest strength is its refusal to manufacture conflict: there are no betrayals, no jealousies, none of the tedious interpersonal drama that coming-of-age movies so often mistake for narrative stakes. These kids genuinely like each other, and they’ve been through hell individually, which means they recognize that kinship matters more than whatever petty grievances might otherwise emerge from spending four weeks in close quarters. I think that choice makes the emotional moments hit harder when they arrive, because they feel earned rather than engineered. If there’s a weakness, it’s that the final act feels slightly rushed, with events that could’ve used more breathing room, but the authenticity of the relationships carries you through.
What Sunny Dancer understands, and what separates it from the maudlin territory of other “sick kid” films, is that teenagers who’ve survived life-threatening illness don’t have to be tragic figures waiting to teach us Important Lessons About Life. They’re just kids trying to figure out who they are, complicated by the fact that they’ve had to confront mortality before most of their peers have given it a passing thought. The film refuses to reduce these characters to their diagnoses, allowing them to be funny, horny, awkward, angry, and occasionally stupid in ways that have nothing to do with being sick, and everything to do with being seventeen.
For fans of coming-of-age films that color outside the established lines, Sunny Dancer is essential viewing. The film doesn’t have distribution yet, which means most audiences will need to wait to experience it, but hopefully the right distributor will snatch it up (it feels like a natural fit for someone like NEON or A24). Jaques takes a premise that could’ve easily devolved into “grief tourism” and transforms it into something joyful, optimistic and genuinely funny; I certainly didn’t expect to walk out of the “chemo camp” movie with such a big smile on my face.
Sunny Dancer is currently screening as part of the 76th annual Berlinale.