Much Ado Abut Dying review – brave, loving record of an actor uncle’s last days

Simon Chambers’ documentary is unsparing in capturing his theatrical relation’s endearing, sometimes desperate and often infuriating decline

Films about film-makers and their kith and kin sometimes get dismissed as self-serving, self-indulgent or even – everyone’s favourite smear word these days – narcissistic. Director Simon Chambers’s wrenching film about his relationship with his aged uncle David is none of those things; I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dying. It’s the sort of thing you might call “raw” – in the sense that wounds are raw – but the craftsmanship is never raw, despite the obvious lack of budget.

Chambers, mostly a voice narrating the story, and occasionally a presence on screen, explains how he was effectively summoned back to London from Delhi where he was making a film about cars. (The clips we see look promising and hopefully someday he’ll finish it.) He had to come home because his David, a former actor and schoolteacher, was struggling to cope with life alone. Practically housebound with a serious hoarding habit, David was not quite mentally or physically disabled enough to qualify for state intervention, but not really capable of taking care of himself either.

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