It arrived the way the worst news always does: without ceremony, without warning, without even the courtesy of a trailer to prepare the heart for what was coming. At 8:01 a.m. GMT, while most of the world was still blinking sleep from its eyes and reaching for the first coffee of the day, Netflix simply placed a new title in the carousel (no countdown, no premiere, no sponsored posts, just a single still of Helen Mirren standing on a wind-battered Cornish cliff path, hair whipping across a face that already seemed to know every secret the ocean was about to drag ashore), and beneath it the words Goodbye June, a title so soft it felt like a breath held too long.
Within four hours the silence had become a scream.
Directed by Kate Winslet in a debut so unflinching it feels less like filmmaking and more like ritual sacrifice performed in real time, written by her twenty-two-year-old son Joe Anders from a story they began shaping in the small hours of lockdown when the house was quiet enough for truth to finally speak, and starring Dame Helen Mirren and Jeremy Swift in performances that should be studied in medical schools for their ability to induce physical pain, this is not a film you watch. This is a film that happens to you, that moves into your chest and rearranges the furniture of every family memory you thought you had safely stored away.
A June That Was Meant to Mend Everything\
Cornwall, the last week of June 2024. The Roscarrock house, a weather-beaten granite beauty clinging to the edge of the cliff like it has been trying to throw itself into the sea for a hundred years and someone keeps pulling it back, has not seen all five remaining members of the family beneath its roof since the funeral of their mother eight summers earlier. This year June herself (the daughter named for the month their mother swore was the only one that ever felt like forgiveness) has turned thirty, and she has begged, cajoled, threatened, and finally bribed them all into returning for one week, one single week, to remember what it felt like to be whole before everything cracked open and let the Atlantic in.
So they come, reluctantly, warily, carrying suitcases full of old wounds dressed up as sundresses and linen shirts. Beatrice (Winslet, rawer than she has ever allowed herself to be on screen), the eldest, a barrister whose empathy was cauterised years ago in courtrooms where mercy is a liability; Felix (James Norton), the once-golden middle son whose novels stopped selling the same year his marriage did and who now measures time in bottles instead of chapters; Iris (Saoirse Ronan), the quiet one who became a palliative-care nurse because someone in the family finally had to learn how to sit with dying people without running away; and Leo (Kit Connor), the baby they all still call “the baby” even though he is twenty-six and the only one brave enough to say “I love you” without wrapping it in sarcasm first.
Their father, Edward (Jeremy Swift), waits on the terrace like a man who has been standing there since 2016 waiting for someone to tell him the war is over. He greets them the way he has greeted every arrival for four decades: with a small nod and the observation that the tide is later than it used to be.
The table is laid with their mother’s blue-and-white plates that no one has touched since the wake. The hydrangeas are blooming the colour of bruises. The sea is the exact shade of a grief that has learned to smile for photographs.
Then June lifts her glass to toast “new beginnings,” and blood begins to pour from her nose in a thick, impossible ribbon that turns the white wine red before it even reaches the tablecloth.
A ruptured cerebral aneurysm. Hours, perhaps a day. No time left for anything except the truth they have all spent their lives rehearsing how to avoid.
Kate Winslet Directs Like She’s Performing an Exorcism on Her Own Past
Winslet keeps the entire film inside the house and on the narrow cliff path that leads nowhere except straight down into the water, turning every room into a confession booth and every window into an accusation. There are no pretty drone shots of turquoise coves, no cutaways to sunsets that might offer relief. There is only the sound of gulls that sound like children crying, the smell of salt that gets into everything, and the way the light in June is so mercilessly bright it makes every shadow look like a bruise that never healed.
The camera refuses to blink. When Beatrice finally turns on her father and says, voice shaking with thirty-eight years of swallowed rage, “You taught us that love was something to be rationed like wartime sugar and we learned to live on crumbs until we forgot what a full meal even tasted like,” Winslet holds the close-up on her own face for so long that audiences report feeling seasick from the intensity of being looked at by someone who is finally allowing herself to be seen. When Iris whispers to her unconscious sister, “I chose to spend my life holding the hands of strangers who were dying because I never learned how to hold yours when you were still alive,” Ronan delivers the line so quietly that you have to turn the volume all the way up, and then you immediately regret it because the silence that follows is louder than any scream.
And then there is the sequence that has already entered cinematic scripture: the thirteen-minute unbroken take around June’s bed as the family gathers for what they know is the last night, while Edward stands in the doorway reciting the same Thomas Hardy poem he read at his wife’s graveside because it is the only language in which he was ever taught to say goodbye. One by one the siblings begin to speak the things they swore they would carry to their own graves: the abortion Iris paid for with money stolen from their mother’s cancer fund, the night Felix tried to drown himself in the cove and was pulled out by fishermen who never told anyone because shame is a family heirloom, the way Leo used to cut himself in the bathroom with their father’s razor because physical pain was easier to explain than the other kind. When Leo finally says, so softly it is almost lost beneath the sound of the sea, “I tried to kill myself the June after Mum died and you were all too busy being strong to notice I had disappeared,” Kit Connor delivers it with such exhausted tenderness that the air in living rooms around the world seems to leave the room all at once.
Helen Mirren and Jeremy Swift Will Live in Your Dreams Now
Helen Mirren is on screen for barely thirty-five minutes, yet every second she occupies feels like a lifetime being condensed into a single breath. In one flashback she dances alone in the kitchen to Van Morrison while her children sleep upstairs, barefoot and laughing at nothing, and you understand in twenty silent seconds why every one of them has spent their adult lives trying to earn back that moment of pure, unearned joy. When she collapses on the terrace, Mirren does it without theatrics: a small stumble, a hand to her temple, a confused half-smile that slides into something ancient and terrified and unbearably human. It is the single most frightening piece of acting you will see this decade.
But Jeremy Swift is the one who will follow you home and sit on the edge of your bed at night until you learn how to sleep again. The man who made us love gentle, stumbling kindness here becomes a cathedral of quiet devastation. Edward is not evil; he is a man who loved his family so clumsily that he crushed them trying to protect them from a world he never learned to trust. When he finally breaks, two hours in, and whispers to his dying daughter, “I thought if I never said I was proud you would never have to be afraid of disappointing me, and all I did was teach you to be afraid of me instead,” Swift says it so softly that half the audience misses it the first time because they are crying too hard to hear anything except their own heart breaking.
The Ending That Refuses to Lie to You
June dies at dawn as the tide goes out and takes the light with it. There is no swelling orchestra, no montage of happier summers, no sudden embrace where everyone forgives everyone else and the credits roll over laughter. There is only the sound of four siblings and their father eating cold quiche straight from the tin because no one can find the plates, and Edward making tea for the first time in forty years without being asked. When Leo rests his head on his father’s shoulder and Edward doesn’t move away, the camera pulls back through the open window and leaves them there, five broken people learning how to occupy the same silence without turning it into a weapon.
The credits roll over real home-video footage of Kate Winslet and Helen Mirren rehearsing the collapse scene on the terrace, laughing until they cry because the fake blood keeps dripping onto the hydrangeas and neither of them can stop long enough to clean it up. It is the only moment of lightness in the entire film, and it feels like being handed a single breath after drowning for two hours and seven minutes.
The Internet Has Entered Its Mourning Period
Twelve hours after release, #GoodbyeJune is the global number-one trend in 94 countries and counting. TikTok is a battlefield of people filming themselves pausing at the 74-minute mark, faces swollen with tears, warning strangers in shaking voices: do not watch this with family, do not watch this alone, maybe just do not watch this at all. Therapists are posting emergency grounding techniques titled “How to survive Goodbye June.” One viral video shows a woman in Lisbon standing barefoot in her garden at 4 a.m. calling her estranged father because “the film made me realise some Junes really are the last ones you get.”
Critics have run out of language. The Guardian’s five-star review consists of a single sentence: “I am writing this with tears on my keyboard and I am not ashamed.” Variety calls it “a masterpiece that should come with a grief counsellor and a priest.”
Watch it tonight, if you dare. Watch it on the largest screen you own, with the lights off and someone whose hand you can break when the pain becomes too much to carry alone. Watch it knowing that Kate Winslet just made the film she needed to survive her own ghosts, and in doing so handed the rest of us the terrible, beautiful permission to survive ours.
Goodbye June is streaming now. It will wreck you gently, thoroughly, and for a very long time. And when it ends, you will never hear the month of June the same way again.
