Ma ma (2015) and Breast Cancer on Screen

Magda is an unemployed primary school teacher in Madrid. In the film's opening scene a doctor, Julián, examines her and finds a lump; she is told she needs chemotherapy and then a mastectomy. Her husband has already left her for a colleague. Her son Dani is football-mad, which is how she meets Arturo, a scout, at a children's match — on the same day his wife and daughter are in a car crash that kills the girl and leaves his wife in a coma. Magda and Arturo become each other's support and then a couple. She gets through treatment: shaved head, wig, prosthetic breast, plans for reconstruction. She is told her chances are good. Then she becomes pregnant, and when the cancer returns and spreads she chooses to carry the baby rather than take treatment that would end the pregnancy. She gives birth to a daughter, Natasha — a name echoing a Russian orphan her doctor had been hoping to adopt — and dies not long afterwards. The film closes on Arturo, Dani and the baby left together.

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

A few things land. The opening examination, and the speed with which a lump becomes a treatment plan, is close to how it goes. The film does not skip the body: hair loss, the wig, the prosthetic breast, conversations about reconstruction, and the specific grief of losing a breast rather than only fearing death. Magda's habit of protecting her son from information, and of performing cheerfulness for everyone around her, is extremely common and rarely dramatised. The tension between wanting to continue a pregnancy and needing treatment is a genuine dilemma faced by pregnant women with breast cancer, and the film is right that it is agonising and that the decision belongs to the patient. Penélope Cruz plays the exhaustion convincingly even when the script does not ask her to.

The film is a tearjerker first and a medical account a distant second. Magda stays radiant, mobile and articulate through chemotherapy and then through terminal metastatic disease and a pregnancy, which is not how any of that feels. Recurrence and spread arrive as a plot beat rather than a staged clinical process, with no scans, no discussion of options and no palliative care. It leans hard on positive thinking as though attitude changes outcome, which it does not. And screening is never raised at all, even though mammography is the standard way breast cancer is found before anyone can feel it.

Breast cancer is one of the few cancers with a clear screening programme. The USPSTF recommends screening mammography every two years for women aged 40 to 74 at average risk (grade B), and NCI notes mammography has been shown to reduce breast cancer deaths in that age band. Screening is for people with no symptoms — if you have already found something, you need assessment, not screening. The signs worth acting on, per NCI and CDC: a new lump or thickening in the breast or armpit, a change in the size or shape of a breast, dimpling or puckering of the skin, skin that is red, flaky or resembles orange peel, a nipple that turns inward, nipple discharge other than milk (especially if bloodstained), and pain in the breast or nipple that does not settle. Most lumps turn out not to be cancer, but a new one should be checked rather than watched. Women with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation, a strong family history, or previous radiotherapy to the chest need a different plan — earlier and more intensive — worked out with a specialist rather than the routine programme.

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.

Cancer Explained is free and ad-free. Nothing is sold on this page and no sponsor sits behind it.

If this helped you understand something, or moved you to ask a question you had been avoiding, you can help keep clear cancer information free for whoever needs it next. Support our work.

Ma ma 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].