Film

A Short Stay in Switzerland

Name: A Short Stay in Switzerland
Genre: TV Movie, Drama
Released: 2009
Cast: Julie Walters, Stephen Campbell Moore, Lyndsey Marshal, Liz White, Michelle Fairley

Drama
Very dark

A gravity-defying examination of a woman's choice in the face of terminal illness. Julie Walters carries this intimate drama with quiet ferocity, playing a physician who must confront the very thing she's spent her career treating. Based on a true story, it handles euthanasia without sentimentality or easy answers—just the excruciating detail of a life that refuses to pretend.

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Still Alice2014

Julianne Moore delivers a performance of devastating clarity as a woman watching her mind leave her. Like Turner's story, it examines autonomy and identity when your body becomes a prison, but through the lens of Alzheimer's rather than motor neurone disease.

But The trajectory is relentless. There are no moments of reprieve, which some find essential to the film's power but others find unsparing to the point of cruelty.

The Farewell2019

A family gathers around a terminal diagnosis and must decide what to do with the truth. It's lighter in tone than Turner's story but shares the same core question: who gets to decide how a life ends, and what do we owe each other?

But The humour can feel incongruous if you're expecting pure tragedy. It's a film that finds laughter in grief, which doesn't land for everyone.

My Life1993

Michael Keaton as a man with terminal cancer planning his own death, creating videos for his unborn son. It's raw and unflinching about mortality, grief, and the impulse to leave something behind. Emotionally bruising in the best way.

But Made in the early 1990s, it has the production values and some emotional register that can feel dated. The earnestness is real, but so is the period cringe.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Sopranos1999

Both are about intelligent people forced to examine their own extinction. One chooses to end the story; the other chooses to tell it.

Not about illness, but about a man choosing therapy over death—confronting himself and his mortality with the same clarity Turner brings to hers. Both are about the bravery of looking unflinchingly at what's already ended.

But Ninety minutes won't capture it. You'll want to stay for all six seasons, and it's a fundamentally different experience (violent, funny, sprawling) from the quiet intensity of Turner's story.

You Don't Know Jack2010

Al Pacino as Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the euthanasia advocate whose assisted deaths became a national firestorm. Thrilling courtroom drama that doesn't resolve the moral question—it just shows you the man and lets you wrestle with it.

But Strongly sympathetic to Kevorkian's position. If you're instinctively opposed to physician-assisted dying, the film's perspective will read as one-sided.

Last Night1998

Don McKellar's sparse, strange film about the last night on Earth. Not about illness, but about choice and death and how we spend our final hours. It's meditative and surreal, occasionally funny, and deeply humane.

But The tone is deliberately diffuse and the plot is episodic. It refuses to build toward anything, which feels deliberate and also occasionally makes you wonder what you're watching.

The Sea Inside2004

Javier Bardem as a paralysed man in Spain fighting for the legal right to die. Shot with visual beauty that contradicts the darkness of the story—Amenábar makes a film about ending life that feels alive. A masterpiece of the form.

But In Spanish, and the subtitles occasionally simplify philosophy into sentence fragments. Also devastating enough that watching it feels like emotional labour.

Wit2001

Emma Thompson as a Donne scholar with terminal ovarian cancer, subjected to experimental treatment. It's about medical cruelty and intellectual vanity and what the body does to the self. Theatre adapted to screen, and it sings.

But The theatrical style can feel mannered, and Thompson's performance is so cerebral that emotion sometimes reads as distance rather than depth.

The Suicide Shop2012

An animated dark comedy from France about a family business built on… well, suicide. Deeply strange and unexpectedly moving about depression, choice, and why we stay alive. It finds pathos in the grotesque.

But The premise is abrasive and the animation style is intentionally ugly. If dark humour about suicide sounds unbearable rather than necessary, skip it entirely.

Lifespan1975

Another true-story drama about physician-assisted dying, featuring Michael Caine. Quieter and more domestic than most on this list. Focuses on the relationship cost as much as the philosophical stakes.

But Less kinetic than similar films. The quietness that makes it moving also makes it easy to drift through without truly engaging.