Breathe

Breathe (2017) is a biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. It marks Andy Serkis's first film as director, and it follows a real man, Robin Cavendish, left paralyzed by polio at twenty-eight.

England, the late 1950s. Robin (Andrew Garfield), a charming adventurer, marries Diana (Claire Foy), and not long after the illness robs him of all movement below the neck and tethers him to a breathing machine. Doctors tell the couple to expect a hospital ward and little else. Diana refuses that future: she brings him home and, with an inventor friend, builds a wheelchair fitted with a respirator so Robin can face the world again instead of a ceiling.

William Nicholson wrote the script and Jonathan Cavendish — the son of that very couple — produced it, so the story comes from family memory rather than a dry record. Garfield carries much of the role on his face alone, and it lands. A warm, unsentimental account of how love can quite literally keep someone alive. Stream Breathe (2017) online on iFILM.