Diractors is an ongoing series in which Hassle writer Jack Draper examines films, new and old, whose directors are better known for their work in front of the camera.
It’s a new year here at Diractors, and we’re starting 2026 with a few late 2025 entries. First up is Kate Winslet’s laborious and limiting Goodbye June, a film which faces all sorts of barriers to entry while never quite clearing any of them. Some of the major diractors– ScarJo, K-Stew, Harris Dickinson– get a Cannes premiere to celebrate this new step in their careers. Instead, Goodbye June was simply dumped to Netflix around the holiday season without even getting much press, despite its timely Christmas aesthetic. There was no writing on the wall that Winslet’s film would be an outright failure for me; I was hoping it would be something like Eric LaRue or Summer of 69, where you see an actor with interesting taste direct something that falls under the radar. Alas, nothing about Goodbye June deserves to be undervalued, since nothing about it is excellent.
Goodbye June is set mostly in the confines of a hospital, and specifically the room of June (Helen Mirren), her four kids (Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette, and Johnny Flynn) and doofy husband (Timothy Spall) by her side. All are coming to terms with June’s cancer diagnosis, which has returned during the holiday season, and none are ready to be the sole communicator. The drama reminds me of, say, The Farewell, in that you can see no easy answers in the family’s ability to let the matriarch live out their final days on a lie with such specificity. I was also reminded of Tamara Jenkins’ Savages, with the brilliant sibling dynamic walking that tightrope between being funny and pathetic. Goodbye June is just none of these things, with only the lightest graze of drama and a refusal for any complexity in the ideas or filmmaking. Writer Joe Anders tries to give everyone in the family some pathos; even the nurse (Fisayo Akinade innocent) is given something of substance. Still, this is just a script without tension. Apart from June’s internalized misogyny, which tends to pop out in women of a certain age, there’s not a lot that feels totally lived in.
All together, the story of Goodbye June is one of privilege, as its tidiness lends itself to being about the grace at which death can come. Your differences are finally put aside, bittersweetness is felt, and you can have an illness that threatens your life with your loved ones surrounding you. At least Anders, the son of Winslet and fellow filmmaker Sam Mendes, knows something about all this. Though the script was conceived during Anders’ time at British National Film and Television School and inspired by the passing of his grandmother (Winslet’s mom), none of that lived in experience bleeds through here. I do blame Anders and Winslet equally, however, for her to not even have some interesting filmmaking nor direct memorable performances (not even my guy Timothy Spall could rock the house here) to help elevate a script that’s in dire need of some help. I’d like something less amateurish from Kate Winslet on her next go around!
Goodbye June
2025
dir. Kate Winslet
114 min.
Now streaming on Netflix
