Cancer Kid: A Tongue-in-Cheek Comedy About Dying Too Soon, Too Alone

Here’s an unthinkable premise: a child prepares for suicide. But Vasili Manikas’16-minute Cancer Kid is a dark comedy that is as funny as it is cute. Owing to a symphony of writing, directing, and the lead performance, the film is a happy balance of silliness and a profound encounter with mortality.

Take your hand, fingers splayed, and place it across your face. Is it totally covered? Do you feel Tom Hardy’s spirit awaken in you? Boom, you have cancer. Or you are the latest victim of a prank started by schoolboys. Your predecessor is ten-year old Elliot (Charlie Zeltzer), a hapless boy now burdened with the wait for his death. It’s perfectly casual for his friends (Emily Watt, Luke Dietz), who help him estimate his options. In parallel to Elliot’s discoveries, they are learning the adult way of offering sympathy but remaining detached from the misfortunes of others.

The premise is rich fodder for think-of-the-children pearl clutchers but the film is cleverly entertaining—a breath of fresh air to watch a child come in contact with awfully complex realities and instead of spontaneously combusting, reach for the slivers of autonomy available to him. It’s funny because it reveals the child not as an alien specimen in need of state-of-the-art security but a present and a future with which our past selves are intimately familiar.

Zeltzer applies himself completely to the role and the camera does not spare any seriousness. It follows him with shared dismay, frames him with the gravity owed to such terrible news. Terminal cancer or not, “suiside” or not, Elliot is discovering the shared human experience of utter isolation: Elliot’s mother (Devon MacDonald) does not clock his despair, his brother (Callum Shoniker) is the classic antagonist, his father is away on a trip, his friends have done their bit. His dog offers its best company and it helps; Elliot ties up the last loose ends with the dog next to him. And the camera responds by variously closing him in within his own mini frame or leaving him adrift in all its widescreen negative space.

It builds up to a fantastic climax, a feat of comic timing and grave mise-en-scéne sprouting out of the ultimate childhood experience: a massive throwdown with your loathed sibling. You will want to laugh out loud as the scales fall away but you might want to hold it in out of respect for a very stressed out little boy who is facing crises unparalleled since the dark ages of Kevin McCallister.

Elliot will have earned at least three swear words.

Watch Cancer Kid Short Film