Irreplaceable You is a Netflix movie about a woman named Abbie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who is in her early 30s and had just become engaged to her long-time boyfriend. She thinks she might be pregnant, but her doctor diagnosis with stage IV cancer instead.
Abbie’s a Type-A personality, a total control freak, so she tries to arrange a partner for her fiancee, Sam (Mikiel Huisman), for after she dies. From the first scene in the movie, we’re told that this is Abbie’s story. Which needed to be said, because we have no idea how Sam feels about his fiancee’s imminent death. He does get upset when he finds out that he’s planning for life after her death. Although he never gives the impression that he would have a tough time moving on. He actually never gives the impression that’s he’s madly in love with her either.
Abbie’s best scenes are with the Dominic (Timothy Simons), a nurse who sits with her through chemotherapy and Myron (Christopher Walker), a fellow cancer sufferer she meets at a support group for cancer patients.
I only found the Irreplaceable You emotional in the last 20 minutes or so and started tearing up after Abbie died. All the emotion of the movie is kept until the last few minutes.
It was the first time I’ve seen Gugu Mbatha-Raw onscreen and she’s beautiful to look at. I believe she has three more projects on Netflix which I’ll check out. However, I didn’t like either Abbie or Sam. Sam was almost a nonperson throughout the movie and Abbie was so shallow or up her own ass as Myron described her to his wife.
It was also kind of weird that Abbie showed little anger at the disease that was taking away her life or anger for the future she’ll never have. Other than obsessing over a partner for Sam, she seemed to have nothing left on her bucket list.
I would recommend this if you like chick flicks and tearjerkers on a Friday night. It’s a pretty harmless movie,
