TIFF 2026: There’s a confident, thorny message somewhere in Trudie Styler’s film co-starring Eva Birthistle, but it’s too shy to come out of hiding
Of all the new wrinkles on the rom-com that 2026 has given us, director Trudie Styler’s “Up Against It” takes the cake for most bizarre, using a child’s cancer diagnosis as the launchpad for a story about true love and the difficulties of parenting.
Its performers are far too talented to have their efforts be wasted on material like this, and yet it is their commitment to the bit, as humiliating as it can be, that saves elements of this film. This feels very much like a project that is still being worked on, its rougher edges sticking out a bit too pointedly to make it feel complete or coherent.
What’s disappointing is that Styler could have the rom-com genre as a Trojan horse through which to discuss complicated questions about divorce, betrayal and complicated family dynamics. As it stands, those elements feel tertiary in that its characters give it a lot of lip service, but it is not quite explored in practice.
Álvaro (Antonio Banderas) and Saffron (Eva Birthistle) play the aforementioned separated couple, who have happily moved on with other partners, played by Úrsula Corberó and Arinzé Kene, respectively. They share custody of their daughter, Rose (Eden Hamilton, who gives the film its bite and pulse). They love Rose and also know that she’s the person who represents a sinew to the past lives they are trying to forget. Just when it seems as though they can find a way to keep Rose in their lives while moving on, their daughter discovers after a night of drinking that she has a rare form of leukemia. The only way she can get better is if she gets a transfusion from someone who shares her genetic make-up. The parents then begin to undergo the process of IVF, but as they are forced back into each other’s orbit, the two begin to wonder whether they should go about the process the more passionate, old-fashioned way, which raises the suspicions and ire of their present-day partners.
It is bold of Styler’s film to focus so much on the IVF process, and the idea of creating a new human being just so it can be used to save another is also the kind of thorny question that frankly is not explored in rom-coms. When Rose hears about her parents’ choice to try and have a baby, she bristles against it. She may value her life, but if the baby is born into a dynamic as acrimonious as Álvaro and Saffron, it may as well not survive the first trimester.
Thanks to Banderas and Birthistle, Álvaro and Saffron feel very much like the couple that has spent years of life together, despite their separation and resentments. They believe in the material, which only makes the disconnect between the forced sentimentality and attempts at humor feel bizarrely calibrated. For every touching moment, such as Álvaro’s and Saffron’s present partners shaving their heads in solidarity with Rose when she begins to lose her hair, you get an NHS Staff Member, Dr. Choy (Selena Tan), joking with Álvaro about the type of pornography he should watch so he can ejaculate quickly so they can get a sperm sample.
I suppose in some way that this messiness can be seen as a commentary that in life, we have to take our laughter and tears together, but rather than make such dissonance naturally build off of one another, it feels like editors Walter Fasano and Nathan Nugent were mandated that if a moment was getting too serious, they’d need to modulate it asap with an ill-placed joke. The film is practically built upon the bait-and-switch trope, and especially with the stakes being as high as a 14-year-old girl dying of cancer, the amount of “fake out” scenes borders on the emotionally manipulative.
I have been grateful that the tent of rom-coms has increasingly expanded to try and reflect different demographics’ relationship to romance and family. Seeing Styler’s quartet come together to care for Rose is a powerful reminder that not all families look the same, and that the best ones are the ones where people realize that they need help and are not self-sustaining. Ironically, the film feels too afraid of its best ideas, unwilling to be vulnerable and naked, deploying awkward humor to mask itself when all it needed to be was honest.
