Sunny Dancer Review

Sunny Dancer is a British coming-of-age comedy-drama that tells the story of a group of teenage cancer survivors bonding over the course of one summer.

Ivy Pritchard (Bella Ramsey) is a 17-year-old girl who has been in remission for 10 months. Ivy has become more closed off, leading her parents (James Norton and Jessica Gunning) to send her to “chemo camp.” She slowly becomes a part of a group and has an opportunity to be a normal teenager.

Sunny Dancer premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and has been distributed by True Brit Entertainment in the UK. It was the film audiences would expect, a mostly light-hearted film about a teenager slowly opening up, making friends, having fun, and having moments of pathos because a health relapse could happen at any time. American films have had success making coming-of-age films about illness, like The Fault in Our Stars and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Sunny Dancer puts a British spin on this type of story.

Sunny Dancer was filled with talented actors. There were recognisable faces in the form of Ramsey, Norton, Gunning, and Neil Patrick Harris, and many emerging young actors. Ramsey’s ability was never in question, and they excelled as a bitter teenager who went from anger, embarrassment, and eye-rolling to having a good time and even falling in love. Harris is known as a comedy actor because of his roles in the Harold & Kumar movies and How I Met Your Mother, and he was funny as the cringy upbeat American. Still, he showed he could be a serious performer when his character laid down some hard truths. Patrick the camp leader may have been embarrassing, but he was a good man who cared for the teens.

The biggest surprise in the cast was Ruby Stokes, who played Ivy’s roommate, Ella, a girl on a mission to lose her V-card to one of the camp counsellors, and she had some of the film’s funniest moments in the film. However, some characters weren’t as well defined. Maisie (Jasmine Elcock) was the one who suffered the most because her only characteristic was that she did tarot readings.

The heart of the film was that this group of teens could be normal. Their childhoods were spent in hospital and getting treatment, and they were outsiders who were pitied or used as vassals for other people to feel they were doing a good deed. Ivy and her group could get up to mischief, break the rules, drink, smoke weed, have relationships, and confide in each other. It was a film made with good intentions. Ivy’s mum was encouraging her daughter to go wild. Ivy became particularly close with Ella, even though they had clashing personalities, like Wednesday Addams and Enid Sinclair, and Jake (Daniel Quinn-Toye), whom Ivy developed romantic feelings for.

However, Sunny Dancer was a risk-averse film. It was a mash-up of teen-illness movies and an American summer camp story. It meant that Sunny Dancer was overly formulaic: any seasoned movie watcher could predict it with ease. Being formulaic isn’t always bad, but Sunny Dancer does stick too closely to its genre tropes and story beats. Some of the harder elements were kept off-screen, like medical treatment and the physical scars they could leave behind. The filmmakers didn’t want their film becoming too much of a downer.

Sunny Dancer was a film that allowed its actors to excel, who were able to propel the film’s comedy. Sadly, Sunny Dancer was let down by its caution.