Better Late Than Never: 'Mayflies' Is a Revelation

On paper, Mayflies is entirely straightforward, a weepy about two lifelong friends navigating a terminal cancer diagnosis in ways that are dignified, messy, and loving til the end. On-screen, it’s a revelation, a profoundly moving meditation on how the loves of our lives – romantic, platonic, familial — interweave with each other and memory. It’s a portrait of people making the best decisions they can when presented with only bad options and being so focused on past mistakes that new mistakes are an inevitability. And yes, it’s about death, too.  

The story – adapted for the screen from Andrew O’Hagan’s novel of the same title by Andrea Gibb – opens with Tully (Tony Curran) cajoling his lifelong best friend, London-based literary figure Jimmy (Martin Compston) into driving up to Scotland to see him, and then sharing the news that he has late-stage metastatic cancer throughout his body – even “in my lymph nodes, whatever the fuck they are” – then immediately asking Jimmy to help him die with dignity before his condition worsens to the point that he lacks the basic motor control to lift and self-administer two small paper cups of medication, at a clinic in Switzerland, where medically assisted suicide is legal.  

Jimmy’s horror at Tully’s request is amplified when Tully confides that although his longtime partner Anna (Ashley Jensen) knows about his diagnosis, she has no idea that he intends to exercise what little control he has by taking his own life. The friends spend the first half of the two-episode series in a complex dance of negotiation. Jimmy hopes against hope that Tully will drop the request; perhaps his prognosis will improve with treatment, or maybe the joy of marrying Anna will make him choose hospice care for his end-of-life arrangements. No dice. Tully is determined to relish every good moment he has left and insists that Anna’s last memories of him be as close to normal as possible. Spirits are to remain high, jokes are to be guffawed at, delicious meals are to be relished. 

The second hour is another series of negotiations, arguments, hopeful and desolate moments, and declarations and demonstrations of love. Jimmy has to cede some power to Anna, who already had the moral authority of being Tully’s partner and now has the legal status as his wife to supersede Jimmy’s role in however much time Tully has. Each jealously guards their influence and time with Tully while striving to find emotional and mental space to agree and work together on this awful group project with him. 

Jimmy, who has known him longer, wants to make good on what he feels he owes Tully for the years of familial love and generosity Tully’s family freely gave him to escape his awful parents. Anna and Tully met in adulthood, so she hasn’t known him the longest, but she probably knows him best. Yet, for all of the love and intimacy each of them enjoys with Tully, neither fully understands the source or depth of his need to control the timeline of his mortality. 

The audience sees it in the brief, silent flashes of his memories of watching, helpless and alone, as his equally helpless father dies of a heart attack on the floor of their house. So many of Tully’s life choices have been born of his desire not to be like his father (Stephen McCole) – not for him a life working in a factory, near-silent and morose for decades, and then dying (“like a prick,” as Tully puts it) unfulfilled, before turning 50 – that the very idea of a death even slightly like his father’s is anathema. He also can’t bear the thought of continuing to exist, as his mother does, as a shell hollowed out by dementia. 

There’s a barely visible, near-unfathomable well of grief within Tully; for all that, he acts lively and seems so emotionally expressive. Curran’s performance, especially when paired with the work done by Tom Glynn-Carney (House of the Dragon) as his much younger self, seamlessly knits together Tully’s contradictions into a coherent whole. He knows how maddening, how galling it is for Jimmy and Anna to agree to help him end his own life, knowing he’ll leave them behind with their grief, unable to offer them any comfort for the anguish he’s doling out. He knows what he’s asking is unfair, and he also knows they won’t be able to resist. He’s too charming and beloved to be told no, and they’re too kind and loving to say it. 

The performances at the heart of Mayflies are worthy of the highest possible praise. As Anna, Jensen is deft, ranging from sparklingly charming to incandescently, righteously furious. She elevates good material to indelible – I’ll be thinking about this turn for years. As Jimmy’s wife, Iona, Tracy Ifeachor isn’t given nearly enough to do, yet still furnishes a number of urgent reality checks as she learns about the plan Jimmy and Tully are cooking up. 

However, this adaptation wouldn’t work without the warmth and fierce tenderness in Curran and Compston’s performances as Tully and Jimmy. Tom Glynn-Carney and Rian Gordon’s work as teen Tully and Jimmy buoy the enduring and unbreakable strength of their loving bond as co-conspirators, cheeky darlings, and pop culture fanatics. 

The flashback scenes with Glynn-Carney and Gordon are interwoven with the present-ish tense narrative (it’s set in 2016) in both blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, silent tidbits of memory, and longer scenes that flesh out the significance of their friendship. It’s the same model of visual storytelling FX's critically lauded The Bear sometimes over-relies on, applied with a light enough touch that it doesn’t get boring or frustrating. The one unsuccessful aspect of Mayflies is the wider ensemble of Jimmy and Tully’s teenage friendship group. They may shine on the page, but on screen, they’re insufficiently distinct, and it was difficult to keep track of which ones were still alive and which had died far too before his time. This might have worked better with a three-episode adaptation, but then Mayflies would have lost its commendable economy.  

It ends, as it must, in both sorrow and joy. It’s awful to be present for another person’s fully intentional last hours, but it’s another gift of intimacy among friends and lovers, and not without a tad of humor. The Joy Division t-shirt Tully wears to his own assisted suicide appointment will elicit hoots of astonished mirth from viewers of a certain age, who will already know that that band disintegrated in the wake of their lead singer and main songwriter Ian Curtis’ death by suicide. They’ll also already know that what rose from Joy Division’s ashes was an equally talented and beloved band, New Order. It’s Tully’s audacious, pitch-blackly funny reminder to Anna, Jimmy, and Iona that they’ll still have each other and that he expects them to carry on without him and perhaps surprise themselves in the process.

Both episodes of Mayflies are streaming on Acorn TV and AMC+.