The central figure, Helen, portrayed with quiet intensity by Vicki Crips, faces a grave illness. She interprets her diagnosis as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a term that implies doctors do not have a clear treatment path. In plain terms, Helen may suffocate from oxygen deprivation in the near future. A fragile glimmer of hope exists through the possibility of a donor lung transplant, yet even that option cannot guarantee salvation.
Seeking a personal remedy, Helen pursues air and meaning in a way of her own choosing. She encounters a mysterious Norwegian man online who operates under the alias Mister. He is ill as well, lives beside the fjords, and, like Helen, longs for a route that is not prescribed by medical authority. Discovering a kindred spirit, Helen travels to Norway. The road ahead is unclear, but it is a path chosen from within rather than imposed by doctors.
The drama More Than Never is sometimes mistaken for the final work in Gaspard Ulliel’s career due to his tragic death in early 2022. In truth, this title represents his penultimate performance, yet it glows with a fatalistic intensity equal to his other projects. Ulliel plays Mathieu, Ellen’s husband, who embodies a thoughtful, protective partner. His compassion and gentleness aim to anchor his wife, ensuring she does not lose herself to fate.
Nevertheless, Helen’s pursuit of life grows more painful with each attempt. Once she enters a room, even brief reunions with friends drift into a mournful stillness. Mathieu’s constant closeness becomes an overwhelming embrace, leaving Helen with little room to breathe in the suffocating care that surrounds her.
Director Emily Atef has long explored the finite nature of existence. Her prior works examined a life stretched to its limits, and More Than Never stands as a stark, intimate meditation on living against the inevitability of death. While previous films touched on mortality in different ways, this one delivers a piercing, unflinching portrait of a life facing its final chapters.
In a private exchange, Mister tells Helen, “The living cannot understand the dead.” This line helps illuminate Mathieu’s failure to grasp that the distance separating him from his wife is not external but internal. Helen, already aware of this truth, spends her last precious days choosing not to cling to him through futile efforts to hold on to life.
Helen finds renewal in the sensory: the majesty of mountains, the rhythm of waves, the whisper of leaves, and the steady, deep breaths that fill her lungs. She longs to shield herself from sympathetic pity and to spare her husband from the heavy burden of walking this treacherous path beside her.
Vicki Crips’ recent turn in Corsage reflected a bold negotiation with life, a choice to slip away from tradition not by escape but by a defiant act of self-ownership. The Bavarian heroine Elizaveta rejected rigid 19th‑century expectations, choosing a final act of subversion rather than submission. In Atef’s film, Crips’s portrayal moves beyond concealment; even without a stunt double, the escape reads as poetry, a private rebellion against a life already decided by fate.
More Than Never presents a tranquil, elegiac mood as Helen embarks on a last journey. The film slows the cadence of life, crafting an atmosphere that invites quiet conversation: for those who have nobody left to speak to, and for those who are ready to listen.
Drawing on ancient beliefs, the Book of the Dead describes a process of splitting the soul after death. Yet if correct rituals preserve the essence, the soul, freed from the mortal shell and touched by magic, can endure in the form of Ah—an enduring breath still present as air itself.
Atef’s work places Helen near this final doorway, offering her one last chance to inhale fully. She does not regret her choice, nor does she permit the living to dictate her desire to depart. The film raises many philosophical and ethical questions, questions without one right answer. Yet, after a story centered on the acute scarcity of oxygen, the viewer may notice a calmer, easier breath—an emotional release that lingers beyond the screen.