Death, like love, is all around. That is something to take away from this difficult, sombre, intimately disturbing and upsetting drama: a movie which breaks what is still culture’s last taboo, and shows the approach of death in all its unthinkable indignity and banality, all its existential anti-climax – and in what feels like real time. It wonders about the professional carer, someone in the pietà business. How often have I complained about the Hollywood prettification of terminal illness? How often have I demanded a movie which tries showing what it is actually like? Now such a film is actually here … and it’s all but unbearable.  Chronic is written and directed by the Mexican film-maker Michel Franco, and it won the best screenplay award at Cannes last year, which is when I first saw it. It is a film which does not get any less harrowing with a second viewing, though another showing exposes the process by which the truth about the leading character is drip-fed into the succession of almost static scenes-from-a-life. I am still a little agnostic about the shocking ending and the semi-intentional act that it appears to show. Perhaps that ending sacrifices some of the subtlety and degree-zero observational rigour that Franco painstakingly accumulates over the preceding hour and a half. But it certainly tops off the uncompromising mood. Franco concentrates all the pain into a single, fierce wound.  Related: Chronic director Michel Franco: ‘How can we understand life without thinking about dying?’  Tim Roth stars, and gives what may well be the performance of his career – calm, studied, mysteriously impassive. He presents as relaxed and detached but in a manner hinting at the first symptom of a dangerous irrationality. This is David, an agency home care nurse assigned to those who are disabled or in the last stages of a terminal illness. From the very first, David is shown as having the highest possible standards of care and professionalism. He is confident and yet discreet, especially when it comes to the difficult process of bathing the patients – that intimate task from which relatives and grownup children naturally shrink. It is a great burden he appears to bear lightly, and these scenes have something of Gerasim and Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy.  The terrible irony is that, within just a few days, David achieves an intimacy with his patients which their spouses and loved ones can’t match; their years and decades of love are superseded in an instant by the professional expertise of a complete stranger. David understands what is going on in a way that they don’t. As the patient begins to retreat from his or her family, David moves in, like a secular priest or confessor giving the last rites. And Franco shows how, in their pre-grief state, the relatives are happy enough for him to take over at first, but then come to resent how they have become excluded from the patient’s life.  But it isn’t only that. David is clearly suffering in some way; he has become a kind of parasite on his patients, exhibiting some sort of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and indications of delusion.  What is most striking about Chronic is how it shows the naked body with absolute candour. David washes the emaciated form of a desperately ill young woman, and later an overweight man who is recovering from a stroke. It is very unusual for any film, of any sort, to show a naked body in a context which is not sexualised or sentimentalised or made prurient – although some might possibly dispute that last point here. Both times I watched Chronic, my instinctive thought was that these bodies are somehow wrong; that somehow they have been misrepresented; that they are not supposed to look this way. In fact, of course, the bodies themselves are quite normal. What is transgressive is simply being made to look at them; being made aware of them. Perhaps this is what death is: it erodes the hard-won status of our identity and returns us to the state of simply being bodies.  David’s own swallowed agony and disconnection is dispersed into this cool assemblage of day-to-day scenes, and in fact the detachment of Franco’s direction mimics David’s emotional numbness. The nearest Roth’s David comes to emotional demonstration is when he enters a certain room in his former home and agonised memories come back. His face appears to age in that single instant. There is a devastating sadness in this deeply intelligent film.
Tim Roth gives possibly the performance of his career in this transgressive and candid film, playing a home care nurse who confronts our mortality head on