Iris

Iris (2001) is a British-American biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Richard Eyre adapted John Bayley's memoirs about his four decades alongside the novelist Iris Murdoch — from their first collision at Oxford to the years when her language, the tool she built twenty-six novels with, began to disappear.

The film moves between two eras. Kate Winslet plays the young Iris: physically bold, intellectually restless, impossible to contain. Judi Dench takes over in the later years, playing a woman trapped inside a mind that no longer holds. Jim Broadbent is John at both ends — the awkward young man chasing her on a bicycle, and the older husband watching her fade. Broadbent won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Hugh Bonneville plays the younger John.

The film's weight comes not from the illness but from what preceded it: a long, unglamorous, entirely real love. Stream Iris (2001) online on iFILM.