Dil Bechara (2020): Two Cancers, One Story

Kizie Basu, twenty-one and living in Jamshedpur with thyroid cancer, moves through her days tethered to an oxygen cylinder and to her parents' anxiety. She meets Manny, a loud, Rajinikanth-obsessed twenty-three-year-old whose osteosarcoma cost him part of a leg and is now in remission, and who is shooting an amateur film with his friend JP. Manny casts her, and they fall in love over a shared fixation on an unfinished song by a reclusive lyricist, Abhimanyu Veer. A trip to Paris to confront Veer is nearly derailed when Kizie's condition worsens and she is hospitalised; the meeting itself is a disappointment, the artist evasive and unkind. Soon after, Manny tells her his cancer has returned and is now terminal. Kizie pushes him and JP to finish the film. Manny stages a mock funeral so he can hear his own eulogies, then dies, leaving her a letter and a completed version of the song. The film premieres to their families, with Manny addressing Kizie directly from the screen.

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

The adaptation keeps its source's sharpest truth: young people with cancer are not saints, and they resent being turned into inspiration. Kizie's oxygen line, her limited stamina, the sudden admission that nearly cancels the trip, and Manny's amputation and prosthesis are treated as ordinary logistics rather than tragedy props. The film is good on parents too, particularly a mother who cannot let go and the constant negotiation between protecting a dying child and letting her live. Manny's pre-death eulogies capture something real about wanting some control over your own ending, and the depiction of recurrence as a categorically different and worse event than first diagnosis is accurate to how patients and oncologists actually experience it.

Both leads stay strikingly well-groomed and energetic for people with advanced disease, and Manny in particular deteriorates on a schedule that suits the plot rather than the biology. Long-haul air travel with severe oxygen-dependent lung involvement is far more complicated than the film allows. Treatment is essentially invisible: no chemotherapy cycles, no scans, no side effects, and pain is badly under-shown. Manny's cancer returns and becomes terminal within what feels like weeks, skipping the grinding sequence of imaging, second-line treatment and decisions that recurrence actually involves.

Two different cancers appear here. Thyroid cancer usually announces itself as a painless lump or swelling at the front of the neck; other signs include a hoarse voice that does not settle, difficulty swallowing or breathing, and swollen neck glands. Most cases are found because someone notices a lump, not by screening. The USPSTF gives screening for thyroid cancer in asymptomatic adults a grade D, meaning it recommends against it, because neck palpation and ultrasound in people without symptoms cause more harm through overdiagnosis and overtreatment than they prevent. Osteosarcoma is a rare bone cancer that mostly affects teenagers and young adults during growth spurts. NCI lists its symptoms as swelling over a bone or bony part of the body, pain in a bone or joint, stiffness in a joint, pain in the arm when lifting, a limp or difficulty walking, and a bone that breaks for no known reason. There is no screening test for it either. So persistent bone pain in an adolescent, especially night pain or pain with swelling around the knee or shoulder, should be examined and imaged rather than written off as a sports injury.

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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Dil Bechara 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].