Sweet rom-com charm meets a healthy dose of cringe in Up Against It. A very strange screenplay by Chloe King (B. Monkey) and Camille Griffin (Silent Night) levels up thanks to director Trudie Styler’s ability to nimbly handle difficult tonal shifts. However, the film’s absurd premise may be too much for audiences to swallow, no matter what the doctor advises, but Styler and a game cast sell it best they can. Up Against It finds itself working against a huge suspension of disbelief, especially since it firmly integrates a realistic portrait of the English health system as part of its design. The science and care may be accurate, but no therapist on the globe can give these people the help they need.

The family in question involves ex partners Saffron (Eva Birthistle) and Álvaro (Antonio Banderas). They put their bickering aside (ish) when their teenage daughter Rose (Eden Hamilton) receives a diagnosis for a rare form of leukemia. Her doctor (Forest Whitaker) presents a complicated proposal for two formerly married people who’ve since forged serious relationships years after their split. Dr. Abara advises that Rose’s best chance is via a stem cell transplant, which requires an extensive donor search. However, the chances for a match increase exponentially through a sibling from the same birth parents. While witnesses the sheer incompatibility of Saffron and Álvaro, he suggests that the two exes, well, make another baby.

While Up Against It roots itself in a very plausible scenario as donor babies can save siblings, even a parent’s willingness to do anything to save his or her child makes this scenario rather farfetched. Saffron and Álvaro agree a little too readily to make another baby—we know where this is going, then—and their partners, Lara (Úrsula Corberó) and Kingsley (Arinzé Kene) go along with it far too quickly, especially since Dr. Abara insists upon a co-parenting scenario in which all four parties agree to raise the potential donor baby.

It also just happens that nobody points out that Rose has aggressive terminal cancer…but seemingly can afford to wait for her parents to put their squabbling aside, do the in-vitro process, and then spend nine months playing Russian roulette with a baby that may or may not save their daughter’s life. One can only wager who should feel worse in this scenario: Rose, for whom her parents don’t seem to be in that much of a rush to save, or the back-up baby born into a toxic relationship as a kind of medicine and/or replacement offspring.

The scenario puts both couples through some predictable beats. Saffron and Álvaro inevitably rekindle old feelings while revisiting their shared parenting journey. Moreover, the impossibly perfect new spouses endure Herculean levels of shitty behaviour while caring for Rose in her parents’ absence. Corberó and Kene inject the film with considerable heart and offer two embodiments of pure selfless love absent in the family they’re both marrying into.

Styler finds some moments of levity amid the silly scenario and, to her credit, draws effective rapports between the cast members to help bridge the story’s credibility. It’s clear that everyone in Up Against It loves each other, but as characters, they’re often hard to love with the script pushing too strenuously into sentimental beats. The film also climaxes with a truly bizarre dance number imbued with a whiff of cultural appropriation that inspires a bigger wince than Dr. Abara’s indecent proposal.

There are exceptions, though, such as a hilarious supporting turn by Serena Tan as a fertility doctor aboard the outrageous scenario. Her deadpan delivery with Banderas in the “donation room” eases one into the farcicality of the scenario. Hamilton offers a refreshing newcomer too and has a great rapport with Corberó and Kene in scenes that reflect the family that Saffron and Álvaro aspire to be. The film has some of the right ingredients to make a winning comedy, but there’s too much up against it in the writing for it to have a fighting chance.

Up Against It premiered at TIFF 2026.

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