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A diagnosis can turn the body into foreign territory, but Onwards and Sideways is equally interested in what happens when illness changes a person’s relationship with work, family, embarrassment, desire, and the culture around them.
Paul Mayhew-Archer’s screenplay has the lived specificity of someone who knows Parkinson’s from inside the condition, while John Madden directs it through the familiar language of British crowd-pleasing drama. That tension gives the film much of its strength and nearly all of its limitations. Its knowledge feels personal. Its dramatic machinery often feels inherited.
Rhys Ifans plays Tony, a widowed teacher whose frozen right hand eventually leads to a Parkinson’s diagnosis. Laura Linney is Emma, an American composer and single mother receiving the same news from the same neurologist, played with brusque detachment by Rory Kinnear.
They are told they may have roughly “five good years” before the disease takes firmer control, and the film uses those years as its organizing structure. The years pass, symptoms change, medication complicates matters, and two strangers gradually become the people best equipped to understand each other.
The setup belongs comfortably beside the humane British dramedies Madden has directed before, especially the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films. Ordinary people face age, illness, social embarrassment, and loss with humor functioning as emotional survival rather than escape. Emma’s presence slightly disturbs that familiar register because she responds with greater openness while Tony conceals, minimizes, and carries on.
He delays telling his son, hides his condition at school, avoids recommended exercise, and times medication around the moments when he most needs to appear well. She pushes toward treatment, community, and disclosure. The contrast gives the film useful friction without reducing either response to nationality.
Tony’s first encounter with the Parkinson’s ballet group captures the film at its sharpest. He does not enter relieved to have found people like him. He is repelled. Seeing possible versions of his own future gathered in one room feels closer to confrontation than comfort. Mayhew-Archer, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2011, appears as Tom, a caustic member of the group who describes the disease through humiliation and loss. That anger matters because it prevents the film’s later hopefulness from arriving too cheaply. Community here has to be resisted before it can become useful.
The medical detail carries the same refusal to simplify. The film moves beyond tremors into rigidity, facial masking, softened speech, nightmares, compulsive behavior, and the strange tradeoffs of medication. Emma briefly believes a new drug regimen has stopped her hand tremor, only to see it return. Later, treatment produces destructive compulsions of its own. The disease does not behave like a clean dramatic antagonist, and medicine does not behave like a clean solution. That messy relationship between symptom and treatment gives the film an authority few illness dramas possess.
There is, however, a cost to all this information. At times the characters seem to carry facts into scenes because the audience needs to hear them. The distinction between lived knowledge and educational dialogue becomes visible, and Madden cannot always disguise it.
The film is far stronger when information emerges through humiliation, bodily failure, or social awkwardness. Tony finally disclosing his diagnosis at work has tension because employment, dignity, and illness collide at once. A list of symptoms can inform us. Watching a man reorganize his medication around the need to appear healthy tells us what that information costs.
Ifans is especially good at making that cost physical. Tony’s deterioration does not arrive as one grand transformation. His limbs become less cooperative, his face stiffer, his gait less reliable, and his fatigue harder to hide. The performance keeps returning to the distance between intention and movement, which may be the film’s most painful idea. Linney has a more volatile trajectory once Emma’s medication begins feeding compulsive behavior. Her growing agitation gives the second half some needed disorder, though the romance itself develops with less precision than the illness does. The actors supply much of the intimacy that the screenplay occasionally rushes.
The supporting cast has less room. Tony’s son and Emma’s daughters pass through the story without receiving the same depth, while Monica Dolan’s Liz is often asked to worry, nag, defend, and finally erupt. Her confrontation with Tony’s neurologist still lands because it condenses the absurdity of Parkinson’s into one furious observation: technology can connect people across the world, yet medicine cannot make signals travel properly across a few inches of the human body. The frustration underneath it feels earned despite the broad delivery.
Madden’s direction is similarly caught between restraint and insistence. Much of the film has the clean, accessible polish of BBC drama, which suits a story built partly to make Parkinson’s legible to audiences who may know little about it. Thomas Newman’s score often presses too firmly on scenes already carrying considerable emotional weight. Tony’s school farewell and some later deterioration sequences reveal the film’s instinct to guarantee the tear rather than trust it. The screenplay understands that Parkinson’s resists neat emotional closure; the filmmaking sometimes behaves as though an audience requires one anyway.
The final stretch finds a harder-earned clarity. There is no cure waiting beyond the romance, and affection cannot reverse neurological decline. Tony’s idea that every story can have a happy ending depending on where one chooses to stop grows less sentimental after the film has shown how arbitrary that stopping point can be. Madden’s familiar British crowd-pleasing mode still searches for dignity in endurance, but Mayhew-Archer refuses to confuse endurance with victory. The characters are still managing medication, bodies, work, family, and one another when the film decides it has reached its stopping point.
Onwards and Sideways had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2026. The romantic drama follows a school teacher and a composer who meet after receiving simultaneous Parkinson’s disease diagnoses on the same morning.
Full Credits
Title: Onwards and Sideways
Distributor: Icon Productions, BBC
Release date: September 10, 2026 (Toronto International Film Festival)
Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes (115 minutes)
Director: John Madden
Writers: Paul Mayhew-Archer
Producers and Executive Producers: Hilary Bevan Jones, John Gore, Hilary Strong, Francis Hopkinson, Ellie Wood, Helen Flint, Rhys Ifans, John Madden, Paul Mayhew-Archer, Lucy Richer
Cast: Laura Linney, Rhys Ifans, Monica Dolan, Rory Kinnear, Leah Byrne, Danielle Galligan, Nicholas Asbury
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Danny Cohen
Editors: Úna Ní Dhonghaíle
Composer: Thomas Newman
The Review
Onwards and Sideways
Onwards and Sideways places unusually intimate knowledge of Parkinson’s inside the familiar architecture of British crowd-pleasing drama. Rhys Ifans and Laura Linney give that tension a human shape, especially when illness appears through concealment, medication, embarrassment, and physical change rather than explanation. John Madden’s sentimental instincts and Thomas Newman’s score occasionally press too hard, while some supporting characters remain functional. Paul Mayhew-Archer’s lived specificity keeps the film from becoming generic, allowing its hope to remain conditional and credible.
PROS
- Rhys Ifans’ detailed physical performance
- Lived-in depiction of Parkinson’s
- Strong symptom and medication specificity
- Hope that avoids denying deterioration
- Effective moments of social discomfort
CONS
- Familiar British dramedy machinery
- Occasional didactic dialogue
- Over-insistent musical scoring
- Thin supporting characters
- Romance develops somewhat quickly
