As A Physically Disabled Adult

This movie doesn't send a message, it tells a story, of an adult who simply could not bear the disability.

It is a lot harder for someone who has lived a very mobile life to adapt to a non-mobile life. I do accounting and in spare time most my hobbies do not involve activities I could not otherwise do in a wheelchair. I also tend to put other people's needs and desires before my own.

As such I could bear up such a life.

But not everyone can and you cannot blame them for it. Going through life suffering and saying they must is the same as torture, which last time I checked was illegal in most of western civilisation...

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The problem with this movie is basically that it never went into WHY he wanted to kill himself. The author went into it with the proposition that everyone would just get why someone in this situation would want to kill themselves and left it at that. The answer to her question of why, was it's his choice. That's a stupid answer. Is it my choice to kill myself right now, even if I'm not in a wheelchair and don't have a debilitating disease? I don't think many people would automatically say yes, it's your choice to me, while they would automatically say yes to him.

At the heart, I don't think it's even about him being a quadriplegic, it's about the fact he sees himself as an object of pity, instead of the object of envy he was before. Even if he was scarred in a fire, knife attack, shot and left with a limp etc, he still probably would have wanted to kill himself because he just couldn't deal with his new body, he didn't even try to deal with it. As she says in the movie he's selfish. Basically he was used to the best of everything in life, the best parties, best apartments, best clothes, best women, best jobs, etc. He views himself as being less than the best and anything less than the best just isn't worth living. He could have been happy, but he couldn't deal with the personal humiliation of needing people and possibly being pitied by strangers. Death was a better option for him.

I get if you have a debilitating disease that will eventually kill you as it progresses to want to end your life humanely and with some dignity before you die a very painful natural death. Be he didn't have a progressive disease. His health was relatively stable. He didn't kill himself because he was depressed or because he was in pain, he almost never took pain meds. He killed himself because he hated himself and his body and that's it. But instead of asking should someone be allowed to kill themselves because of self loathing, it just assumes we would all loath ourselves in the same situation, which is messed up.

The movie would have been much better if they would have given "the why" he wants to kill himself some depth and also the some depth into euthanasia. The ending was just so shallow, and it killed (no pun intended), what was otherwise a nice movie.

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I agree with OP, cadosager. This is just a movie based on a book, both formats that like to romanticise everything. At the end of the day, it's fictitious entertainment. If you're perfectly conscious person although having a disability, then there's plenty to do, learn and experience before you go towards that last experience we all do. It's a life worth living and discovering. Ignore all the people who are defending this movie, they are only doing so because they are fans of the movie and at some level buy into it. Real life is far more precious. Real life is very different and far more serious and complicated than any movie or book could ever be, no matter how much it would feel as though to us when we are fully invested in it for a couple of hours.

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A couple of points I will make.

It's true that young people today have a general lack of resilience, largely due to the gynocentric nature of the entirety of childhood (single mothers, almost all early education teachers being female and so on). We have teens suiciding over the most trivial things because they have been taught no coping skills due lack of fathers as well as the "everyone gets a prize for participating" kind of mentality in schools.

So yes, suicide as the first response to adversity is a real problem.

However, there are two major differences to your life story and that of the Will character. Firstly, you have had your condition all your life, and you have learned how to manage it. Will's change was sudden and complete. It's sort of like someone who grows up in a third world slum can accept their lot in life, but if you took some spoiled brat from the suburbs and planted them in the third world, they wouldn't last a week before wanting to end it all. The loss in the quality of life from before to after is too much.

Secondly, quadriplegia is a much worse condition than paraplegia or cerebral palsy or many other conditions that can confine a person to a wheelchair. For me it's a nightmarish scenario, second only to locked in syndrome. A person who still has use of their upper body is still able to accomplish a lot and have significant autonomy. Someone who can only move their neck and face - it's massively more limiting.

I am not necessarily pro euthanasia but the Will depicted in the film with a handsome unblemished face and fit body is not even close to realistic.

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What message does this film send to impressionable disabled youth or, for that matter, anyone living with disabilities grappling with their existence? I think this film is fairly insensitive. I hope its message was simply rooted in ignorance.

Here's the problem: "Disability" doesn't mean the same thing for everyone. I have Cerebral Palsy, and although I use a wheelchair, I'm fully independent. I couldn't begin to understand what it's like to have a disability like the one portrayed in this film. My experiences as a disabled person are far different than millions of others.

That's why it's a mistake, IMO, to act like this movie is expressing an opinion about disability as a whole. It's not, any more than a movie about a character getting divorced is making a statement for how you should handle that, or a film about someone who loses their spouse is making a statement about how you should grieve as a widow.

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OP I agree with you.

...on a side note I can't believe some of these comments.

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I'm sorry if this sounds insensitive, but the writer gives us Will's backstory that unlike you, he has been disabled recently, and before that he enjoyed his life very much. That past is what haunting him every night, and he can no longer compromise with the fact that he won't be able living like he used to be. I mean, he actually tastes what it feels like to be able-bodied, and suddenly everything is disappear. I also think that while Will's parents hired Louisa and previous caretakers to make him change his mind, Will actually fell for Lou. And as any other falling-in-love gentlemen, he wants her to be happy, and so ironically determined to end his life to not force Lou wastes her life tending him and instead tell her to step out of comfort zone.

I've never been disabled (thank God) and also in my religion suicide is forbidden, yet I can't help but sympathize with Will.

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Your point is well taken, however, what seemed to motivate Will Traynor more than anything was the comparison between what he used to be and what he had become. He couldn't tolerate remembering how life was, and no matter how good it might be in the present it would never measure up to what it was in the past. He said it more than once: the loss of his "old self" was what drove him to end his life.

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