Other People (2016) and Leiomyosarcoma

David Mulcahey, a struggling New York comedy writer whose sketch pilot has just been rejected and whose long relationship with his boyfriend Paul has just ended, moves back to Sacramento for a year to help care for his mother Joanne, who has a rare leiomyosarcoma. The film opens at the moment of her death and then loops back through the preceding year. It is structured as a comedy: awkward run-ins with old classmates, a teenage neighbour's drag act, birthdays, and a mother who keeps making jokes about her own situation. Joanne goes through chemotherapy, loses her hair, has a deceptively good stretch, then decides to stop treatment. David's father Norman refuses to acknowledge his son's sexuality or meet Paul, and that stays unresolved for most of the film. Joanne dies at home in December with the family around her. Afterwards Norman quietly pays for Paul's flight to the funeral, an admission he cannot make out loud.

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

This is one of the more honest films about the texture of a terminal year. It catches the strange comedy of it: families keep telling jokes, friends say clumsy things, and the dying person often ends up managing everyone else's feelings. Joanne's decision to stop chemotherapy is presented as an informed choice she is entitled to make rather than as giving up, which reflects how oncology actually frames treatment-versus-comfort discussions. Home-based end-of-life care is shown realistically: the bed moved downstairs, the equipment, the smells, the rota, the long boredom punctuated by crisis. It is truthful that adult children arrive as amateurs, and that caregiving is repetitive, undignified and physically intimate in ways nobody warns you about. The final decline is not softened, and the film does not give anyone a redemptive deathbed speech.

Diagnosis and staging happen before the film starts, so viewers never see how a sarcoma is actually found and worked up: a lump or a mass on imaging, a biopsy read by a sarcoma pathologist, then referral to a specialist centre. The film also lets Joanne remain lucid, funny and conversational until close to the end, whereas real advanced disease more often brings weeks of sleepiness, confusion and withdrawal. Symptom control, the hospice team and the practical business of syringe drivers and breakthrough medication are largely offscreen, which understates how much clinical support a home death normally requires.

Leiomyosarcoma is a cancer of smooth muscle, the involuntary muscle in the walls of blood vessels, the uterus and the digestive tract. It is one subtype of soft tissue sarcoma, and soft tissue sarcomas as a group are rare compared with cancers of the breast, lung, bowel or prostate. NCI describes the typical presentation as a painless lump under the skin, often on an arm or a leg, that grows over time. Sarcomas that start deep in the abdomen or pelvis frequently cause no symptoms at all until the mass is large, at which point people may notice pain, swelling, a feeling of fullness, breathlessness, or bleeding; for uterine leiomyosarcoma, abnormal vaginal bleeding is a common first sign. There is no screening test for sarcoma for people at average risk. No blood test, scan or examination is recommended for people without symptoms, and no US body recommends one. Detection depends on someone reporting a lump, particularly one that is larger than a golf ball, sits deep to the muscle, or is growing, and being referred for imaging and a biopsy. The biopsy is best arranged through a sarcoma specialist centre, because how it is done affects later surgery.

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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Other People 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].