Miss You Already (2015): Breast Cancer and Friendship

Milly and Jess have been inseparable since childhood in London, with Milly the glamorous, chaotic one and Jess the steadier friend quietly trying to conceive. Milly, who has been putting off a check-up, is told a breast lump is malignant and begins chemotherapy; Jess sits through it with her while concealing that her own IVF has worked. When the results push the surgical plan from lumpectomy to a double mastectomy, Milly's marriage and her sense of herself come apart, and she starts an affair while pushing Jess away. Their friendship ruptures on the Yorkshire moors, and the two are still estranged when Milly's headaches turn out to be the cancer having spread to her brain. Milly loses much of her sight, moves into a hospice, and sets herself one goal: to be there when Jess gives birth. She makes it, meets the baby, and dies shortly afterwards.

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

The film is unusually good on the social wreckage around illness rather than the illness itself — the friend who is exhausted and resentful and cannot say so, the husband who cannot look at his wife's body, the children who ask whether their mother is dead. Milly is written as difficult, vain and often unkind while dying, which is a rare refusal of the noble-patient template. The physical detail is specific rather than tasteful: the post-op bra, the wig, the reconstruction that is always one hurdle away, and later the cane and the loss of sight. Best of all is the way both women keep score of ordinary humiliations against extraordinary ones.

The disease moves at the speed of the friendship plot — the estrangement, the reconciliation and the terminal news arrive in a sequence engineered so that Milly's decline and Jess's pregnancy peak in the same week. Milly's late-stage loss of vision is deployed mainly for visual poetry, and the film skips most of what a hospice admission actually involves in favour of a compressed, well-lit deathbed. The childbirth-and-death crosscut is a construction, not an observation.

The film is precise, and the error is in the summaries.

On screen, a consultant explains that the plan is moving from lumpectomy and radiation to mastectomy specifically because the cancer is triple negative and because of her genetic testing results. Later, an MRI confirms the cancer has spread to her brain, and Milly quotes the phrase "metastatic brain tumours" back at her friend. Both facts are stated, not inferred.

What is not in the film is remission. The word does not appear anywhere in the dialogue. The formulation that has circulated — that her breast cancer was in remission while she also had fatal brain tumours — originates in a plot summary and has been copied into derivative sites. It is internally contradictory on its own terms, and the film shows a continuous progression instead: malignant lump, chemotherapy, escalated surgery, a hoped-for reconstruction she never becomes well enough to have, then headaches, an MRI, and the news.

One more thing worth flagging: a character does say "you had brain cancer" at one point. That is Jess, a lay friend, speaking loosely. It is characterisation, not the film's diagnosis.

Two terms in this film are worth having straight, because both are commonly misread.

Triple negative describes what a breast cancer's cells do not have. Some breast cancers carry receptors that specific treatments are designed to target; when a tumour lacks all three of the ones routinely tested for, it is called triple negative, and that changes which treatments are useful. It is a description of the tumour's biology, not a measure of how bad the situation is — see what triple negative means.

Metastatic brain tumours are not brain cancer. When breast cancer spreads to the brain, the tumours there are made of breast cancer cells, and the disease is still breast cancer — treated according to breast cancer's biology, not according to a cancer that started in brain tissue. The film uses the right phrase; its friend character does not, which is exactly how the confusion spreads in real life. Brain metastases covers what this means in practice, including the symptoms — headaches, vision changes — that led Milly to the scan.

The general rule underneath both, one more time: a cancer keeps the name of where it started.

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 only thing on the list 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.

Miss You Already gets the medicine right and has been summarised wrong. There is no remission in it. What there is, unusually, is a dying woman allowed to be selfish and awful — and a friendship that survives her being it.

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].