All My Life (2020) and Advanced Liver Cancer

Jenn Carter and Solomon Chau meet, fall for each other and get engaged; he is an aspiring chef, and they are planning a wedding roughly a year and a half away. Then Solomon is diagnosed with liver cancer. Surgery follows, and for a while the news is good. A later scan shows the cancer has spread, and the timeline collapses: they will not reach the original date. Their friends launch a crowdfunding campaign, and the wedding is pulled forward and assembled in a matter of weeks by the people around them. The wedding happens. Solomon deteriorates afterwards and dies. The film ends with Jenn receiving what he arranged before his death — a recorded message thanking her for loving him, and a honeymoon he had quietly paid for. His friends open a restaurant named after his motto, 'Now or Never'. In reality Solomon Chau was diagnosed in December 2014 aged 26, married Jenn on 11 April 2015, and died on 17 August 2015.

Spoilers throughout. Discussing the cancer storyline means discussing how this ends.

The film's strongest and most accurate element is that it is about logistics as much as grief. Real families facing a short prognosis do exactly this: they compress plans, they crowdfund, they lean on friends to do the work, and they make in weeks decisions that would ordinarily take years. The crowdfunding thread is faithful to what actually happened. It is also honest that a 'successful' cancer surgery is not the end of the story — the discovery months later that disease has spread is a devastatingly common sequence that films usually skip. Jenn's experience of becoming a carer and a fiancee simultaneously, and Solomon's insistence on preparing things for her to find afterwards, both reflect well-documented behaviour in people living with advanced illness.

Solomon stays photogenic and largely comfortable almost to the end. Advanced liver cancer in reality involves jaundice, abdominal swelling from fluid, severe fatigue, pain, appetite loss and often confusion — very little of which is shown. The film compresses and smooths the medical timeline: treatment decisions, chemotherapy, scan results and palliative care are largely off screen, and the disease functions mainly as a deadline for the wedding. It also never asks why a healthy 26-year-old developed liver cancer, or touches the hepatitis and cirrhosis risk factors that dominate the real epidemiology of this disease.

Liver cancer usually causes no symptoms at all early on, which is a large part of why it is so often found late. CDC lists the later signs as discomfort in the upper abdomen on the right side, a swollen abdomen, a hard lump on the right side just below the rib cage, jaundice (yellowing of the skin or eyes), easy bruising, unusual tiredness, nausea, loss of appetite and unexplained weight loss. By the time these appear the disease is frequently advanced.

There is no recommended liver cancer screening for adults at average risk. NCI states plainly that there is no standard or routine screening test for liver cancer; ultrasound, CT and the alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) blood test are used or studied in people already known to be at high risk, not in the general population. High risk chiefly means chronic hepatitis B or C infection or cirrhosis. CDC also lists heavy alcohol use, being overweight or obese, fatty liver disease, diabetes, haemochromatosis, smoking and aflatoxin exposure among risk factors. Practically, the strongest steps are hepatitis B vaccination and being tested for hepatitis B and C and treated if positive, since that is what identifies who needs surveillance in the first place.

A film is not a diagnosis, and a dramatised illness is not a guide to your own. What a story like this is genuinely good for is lowering the barrier to a conversation you might otherwise put off.

If something in your body has changed and stayed changed for a few weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor — not because it is likely to be cancer, but because most of the time it will not be, and finding that out is the point. Where screening exists for a cancer, it is the one thing you can do before anything is wrong at all. See screening and possible warning signs.

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All My Life is worth watching as a film. It is not a guide to the disease it portrays. The gap between the two is what this page is for — and the thing worth carrying away is that a change which persists is worth a conversation, whatever a story led you to expect.

This page describes a work of film or television for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email [email protected].