Death of a Superhero (2011)

Donald Clarke is fifteen, living in Dublin, and dying. He fills notebooks with a comic strip in which a muscled, invulnerable hero fights a female villain who kills with a syringe and a kiss - a fantasy version of the treatment and the disease that are taking him apart. Off the page he is angry, foul-mouthed and destructive, tagging walls and walking out of hospital appointments. After he goes to a railway line intending to kill himself and cannot do it, his parents send him to Adrian King, a psychiatrist who has buried his own wife and refuses to be shocked by anything Don does, including vandalising his boat. Don falls for a classmate, Shelly, then betrays her publicly when a humiliating video of her circulates. His older brother Jeff tries to arrange for him to have sex before he dies; Don walks out on the girl to go and apologise to Shelly instead. They sit together on a beach, and she promises to remember him. He dies at home, in his own bed.

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

The emotional texture is unusually honest for a teenage cancer film. Don's rage is directed at everyone who is going to outlive him, and the film lets him be unlikeable rather than saintly. It shows what illness does to a household: a mother monitoring every mouthful, a father retreating into practicalities, a brother improvising a kindness nobody asked for. The suicidal thinking is treated as a real clinical problem needing a real clinician, not a plot flourish, and the psychiatrist works by tolerating Don rather than curing him. Hair loss, exhaustion and the flat, transactional language of appointments and scan results are all present. The ending - a quiet death at home, no last-minute reprieve - is more truthful than most films of this kind manage.

Because the cancer is never named, the film skips the whole diagnostic story: how Don was found, what tests were done, what the recurrence actually meant. Don also stays mobile, articulate and physically capable far longer than someone with end-stage disease usually is; he cycles, fights, parties and draws almost until the final scene, with no depiction of the pain control, breathlessness or hospital-bed weeks that typically precede a death like his. The dying itself is compressed into one gentle, tidy moment. Palliative care exists in the film only as an absence.

The film does not name the disease, so the honest medical anchor is the leukaemia of the source novel. In teenagers, acute leukaemia rarely arrives dramatically. The National Cancer Institute lists the things that should prompt a doctor's visit: tiredness and unusual paleness, fever, infections that keep returning, easy bruising or bleeding, nosebleeds, flat pinpoint dark-red spots under the skin called petechiae, pain in the bones or joints, swollen glands in the neck, armpit or groin, fullness or pain under the ribs, loss of appetite and unexplained weight loss. Many of these look like flu, glandular fever or sports strain, which is why they are often explained away for weeks. There is no screening test for leukaemia in healthy children or teenagers. No blood test is offered or recommended to people without symptoms, and no organisation screens for it - so the only route to early diagnosis is acting on symptoms that persist or do not fit a simple infection. Diagnosis begins with a full blood count, followed by bone marrow aspiration and biopsy, genetic testing of the marrow cells, and a lumbar puncture to see whether the disease has reached the fluid around the brain and spinal cord.

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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Death of a Superhero 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].