Decoding Annie Parker

Decoding Annie Parker (2014) is a fact-based drama you can watch online on iFILM. Samantha Morton plays Annie, a woman who buries her mother and then her sister to cancer before hearing the same word about herself — and refuses to chalk it all up to bad luck.

A second thread runs alongside hers. Helen Hunt plays a geneticist chasing a hunch her peers keep laughing off: that cancer can run in families, that a single gene might carry it. For most of the film the two women never meet — one living the disease, the other hunting its cause in a lab — until their paths converge around a discovery that reshaped oncology. Aaron Paul, Alice Eve, Rashida Jones and Maggie Grace fill out the cast.

Director Steven Bernstein laces the heavy subject with a dry, unexpected streak of humor; Annie cracks jokes from a hospital bed, and the movie rides her stubbornness rather than asking for pity. It's really the story of how the BRCA1 gene was found, told through one stubborn patient instead of a dry timeline of breakthroughs. Stream Decoding Annie Parker (2014) online on iFILM.