The Girl with Nine Wigs (2013): Nine Versions of Her

Sophie is a student in her early twenties, newly enrolled and enjoying her life, when persistent nausea sends her to a doctor who finds a malignant tumour. She decides the illness will not be allowed to run her life, and keeps going out, flirting and writing a daily blog through months of chemotherapy. When her hair starts coming out she shaves her head herself and acquires nine wigs, each of which she names and treats as a different version of herself — one for the club, one for the ward, one for her family. Her best friend goes out with her, she falls for a long-standing friend, and on the ward she befriends a young boy also being treated and an older patient, Chantal. The film ends with Sophie recovering — but sitting at Chantal's deathbed, so that her own survival is not presented as the rule.

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

The wigs are the film's best insight and they are drawn from life: they work not as a cover-up but as a way of choosing which self to be in a given room, which is a real strategy for people whose appearance has become public property. It is unusually frank that a young cancer patient still wants sex, parties and flirtation, and refuses to make her saintly about it. The ward is portrayed as boring and depleting as much as frightening, and the film keeps the friendships made there — including a child and a dying older woman — as relationships rather than lessons.

The film is a tragicomedy and it looks like one: Sophie stays photogenic and mobile through treatment, and the worst of the toxicity happens between scenes. Named diagnostic detail is a single passing beat rather than a thread, so the illness is textured emotionally but stays vague clinically. Relocating the story from Amsterdam to Hamburg and renaming the family shift the memoir's shape for dramatic convenience.

Three labels circulate, and they need separating.

Rhabdomyosarcoma is what the memoirist actually had and what the film names on screen, in the scene where Sophie searches for her diagnosis online after the tumour is found.

Pleural cancer comes from the opening line of the German Wikipedia article and from viewer write-ups. It describes where the tumour sat — the real tumour grew at the chest-wall musculature and attached to a lung — rather than a different disease. Note that German Wikipedia's own plot section names no type at all; only the uncited lead sentence does.

Lymphoma has no support anywhere we could find, is contradicted by both film and memoir, and should be treated as an error.

Worth adding: the official sales synopsis and the major listing sites all say only "cancer", so a page built from the marketing materials alone would correctly report it as unspecified.

The confusion in this film's record is a good illustration of something that trips people up constantly: cancers are named in two different ways, and the two get mixed together.

One way is by where it sits — chest wall, pleura, lung. The other is by what kind of cell it started in — which is what separates a carcinoma from a sarcoma, a leukemia and a lymphoma. A tumour can be accurately described both ways at once, which is exactly how "rhabdomyosarcoma" and "pleural cancer" ended up looking like a contradiction when they were not.

Rhabdomyosarcoma is a cancer that starts in cells that would normally develop into skeletal muscle. It is one of the soft-tissue sarcomas, which are rare as a group and much rarer than the cancers most people have heard of. That rarity is part of why Sophie's first move is to search the internet, and part of why what she found there frightened her.

The film's last note is the one worth keeping. Sophie recovers; Chantal does not. The film sits them in the same room on purpose.

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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The Girl with Nine Wigs is a genuinely good film about identity under treatment, and it has been given three different diagnoses by people writing about it. Only one of them is right, and the other two are a lesson in how cancers get named.

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].