The great love stories, the ones that care about more than surface tingles, are invariably illness stories too, steeped as they are in the turbulent details of symptoms, ache, confusion, diagnosis, treatment and cure (forever-after health not always being the case if tissues are needed). Which may be why the movie romances that introduce physiological ailment can too often feel conveniently engineered, a shortcut to suffering: the second-act cough that’s both hacking and hackneyed.
But Norwegian filmmaker Maria Sødahl, with her remarkable feature “Hope” about a terminal diagnosis’ effect on a well ensconced but estranged couple has found something miraculous and moving: an adult love story born of mortality, built from the remnants of a connection long thought lost, navigated in tandem with sickness. And because of that emotional intelligence, it’s fluidly both specific and universal.