Now Is Good (2012): Choosing to Stop Treatment

Tessa Scott is seventeen, lives in Brighton, and has had leukemia since she was a child. She decides to stop treatment and instead works through a list of things she wants to do before she dies — saying yes to everything, drugs, shoplifting, sex — dragging her best friend Zoey along with her. Her father has given up work to care for her and cannot bring himself to accept that she is dying; her mother drifts in and out; her younger brother absorbs himself in magic tricks while the household organises itself entirely around his sister. Tessa falls in love with Adam, the boy next door, who is grieving his own father. In the final stretch she deteriorates and the film moves to her bedroom at home, where her family and Adam keep vigil and her narration breaks into fragments as she dies.

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

The film is good on the texture of a long illness rather than a sudden one: the boredom, the flashes of cruelty toward the people doing the caring, the total loss of privacy that comes with being handled and watched. It is unusually honest that stopping treatment can be a considered decision rather than a collapse of will, and that the people around a dying person will not all agree with it. The family dynamics ring true — the father who hovers, the mother who flees, the sibling quietly pushed to the edge of his own household.

Tessa stays photogenic and articulate almost to the end, and reviewers picked up on the film's tendency to have her dying prettily. Her decline is compressed into a shapely emotional arc, and clinical detail is sparse and largely decorative. The romance arrives exactly when the structure needs it. The list itself — the crimes, the drugs, the first sexual encounter — is a device for generating scenes, not a portrait of how a seriously ill teenager's days actually pass.

Leukemia is not in dispute. The subtype is, and the reason is worth knowing: it comes from the book.

Jenny Downham's novel Before I Die names Tessa's subtype outright. Wikipedia's article on the film carries that name across. The reviews and distributor-facing synopses we checked — including the trade press — say only "leukaemia", with no subtype, and we could not confirm that a subtype is spoken on screen or printed in the official synopsis.

That is a small distinction with a general lesson attached. Adaptations routinely drop clinical specifics that novels state plainly, and reference works then reunite them. If you are reading about a film and a precise diagnosis appears, it is worth asking whether it came from the film or from the thing the film was based on.

The decision at the centre of this film is real, it is legitimate, and it is badly understood.

Stopping treatment aimed at controlling a cancer is not the same as stopping care. When further anti-cancer treatment is not going to help, or when the cost of it outweighs what it can buy, the focus shifts to symptoms, comfort and time — and that shift usually means more attention, not less. Palliative care is the specialist version of this, and it is not the same thing as hospice care: palliative care can run alongside treatment intended to cure, from diagnosis onward.

The film also touches on something families navigate badly and rarely name: not everyone wants the same amount of information. Tessa has decided; her father has not caught up. That is ordinary. How much prognosis information you actually want is a question worth answering for yourself and telling your team, because they cannot guess.

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.

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Now Is Good is a well-made film about a decision that real people make and real families struggle with. The list is fiction. The decision is not — and the thing worth carrying away is that stopping treatment and stopping care are two different things.

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].