Despite being a film about childhood cancer, “Sunny Dancer” makes a point not to show its audience any of the disease’s worst moments. There’s not a hospital bed or doctor to be found, and its most tragic diagnoses and deaths happen offscreen. Watch the movie on mute, and you’d probably have no idea that it’s even about cancer, as it just looks like a routine coming-of-age movie set at a summer camp.
That’s all by design, but it doesn’t change the fact that cancer looms large over every scene. “Sunny Dancer” follows Ivy (Bella Ramsey), a 17-year-old who has been in remission for 10 months. She’s healthy, but her battle with cancer robbed her of quite a few formative teenage experiences and left her socially stunted. Sensing this, her parents all but force her to spend a summer at CRF (an acronym for “Children Run Free”), a camp designed to ease cancer survivors and patients back into childhood.
After everything she’s been through, Ivy can sense pity from a mile away. She makes it clear that she has no interest in attending something she dismissively calls “Chemo Camp.” She’s self-aware enough to intrinsically understand that her social development has been damaged, but her desire for normalcy is almost outweighed by her distaste for anything that makes her feel like a “Make-a-Wish Kid.” But the autonomy of 17-year-olds has its limits, and Ivy soon finds herself shipped off to a month at camp against her will.
CRF is far from the hellscape that Ivy makes it out to be, and it immediately becomes clear that sometimes our parents really do know best. The operation is run by Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris), a parent who lost a child to cancer and devoted his life to making the experience easier for other families battling the disease. He demonstrates an admirable amount of patience for Ivy’s blatant expressions of displeasure, though he eventually stops hiding how much her barbed complaints about his life’s work hurt him. But even when he drops the niceties, he never stops trying to give her a second chance at childhood innocence.
You can probably guess where things go from here: the magic of a teenage summer slowly grinds down Ivy’s negativity, and her experiences with friendships and romances give her a new lease on life. “Sunny Dancer” relies heavily on established beats from other coming-of-age movies, though Jaques dramatizes everything with the maturity of an artist who understands that every teenager thinks these experiences are completely unique to them. The film arrives in cliched territory by its third act (“Here, I’m just Ivy, not Ivy with cancer”), but it’s not as if anyone watching a movie about children recovering from cancer wants to see it end any other way.
Even if the film is straightforward and predictable at times, “Sunny Dancer” somewhat redeems itself with the sincerity of its performances. Ramsey is superb as Ivy, opting to lean into the character’s failed attempts at normalcy and let her stunted development and inherent distrust in the notion that anything good will ever happen to her emerge naturally. Harris is similarly excellent as Patrick, eschewing the temptation to lean too hard into either being the “cool adult” or a dorky and out-of-touch one. Just like his campers, he carries his own pain and alternates between deep empathy and outbursts when he can’t take it anymore. But there’s never a doubt that Patrick is trying to make an inherently unfair world a slightly better place every day, and even the most cynical viewers are likely to take pleasure in seeing him make a little progress.
In the film’s press materials, Jaques explains that his goal was to make a cancer movie that prioritizes joyful moments without hiding the weight of its subject matter. It’s an admirable goal, and one that he certainly achieves. Given how much of the movie is just a straightforward summer coming-of-age story, “Sunny Dancer” might work better as a concept on paper than a movie onscreen. But there’s still no denying that, just like Patrick, Jaques has made a bleak subgenre of cinema a little bit sunnier.
Grade: B-
“Sunny Dancer” premiered at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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