Film Review: Don’t Say Good Luck (2026) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There is a moment early in Don’t Say Good Luck when Sophie Birenbaum, played by Sunny Sandler with a kind of shy, unfinished bravery, stands in a high-school auditorium and sings. She is auditioning for the lead in the school production of Waitress. Her voice is not yet polished, her body still half-apologetic for taking up space, but something honest cuts through. You lean forward. You believe her.
Julia Hart’s film is about what happens when the biggest stage of your young life arrives at the exact moment the ground beneath your family begins to crack. Sophie’s mother, Elizabeth (Melanie Lynskey), has learned that her cancer has returned. The drama onstage and the drama at home start to bleed into each other until neither can be told cleanly without the other.
Hart and her co-writers (Laura Hankin and Jordan Horowitz) refuse the easy shortcuts of the illness movie. They do not bathe every scene in soft light or swelling strings designed to extract tears on schedule. Instead they watch, patiently, as a sixteen-year-old tries to hold two impossible things at once: the fierce, selfish hunger of a young artist who has finally been given the role she wants, and the terrified love of a daughter who can already feel the shape of absence forming in the house.
Sandler is a revelation. She has been in her father’s films for years, usually as a supporting presence with comic timing. Here she is given the center and she occupies it without strain. Sophie is not a prodigy or a wounded saint. She is awkward, sometimes petty, occasionally radiant. When she looks at her mother, you can see both the child who still wants to be protected and the young woman beginning to understand that protection is no longer available. That double vision is the film’s real achievement.
Lynskey matches her beat for beat. She plays a woman who is still trying to mother even as her body begins to fail her. There is no grandstanding, no big speech about legacy or courage. Just the daily, exhausting work of staying present for her daughter while the future shrinks. Their scenes together have the quiet electricity of people who know each other too well to perform for one another.
The supporting cast is strong without cluttering the frame. Max Greenfield, as the father, finds the right note of helpless good humor. Stephanie Beatriz brings a welcome sharpness as the drama teacher who refuses to treat Sophie’s personal crisis as an excuse for less than the work. Even the smaller turns—Steve Buscemi, Bebe Neuwirth—feel lived-in rather than decorative.
The film is not perfect. A subplot involving Sophie’s crush on her co-star drifts a little too close to familiar territory, and the final private performance risks tipping into the very sentimentality the rest of the movie has so carefully avoided. But these are minor distractions in a picture that mostly trusts its audience to feel without being instructed how to feel.
What stays with you is the particular texture of this family and this moment. The way a teenage girl learns that “break a leg” is safer than “good luck” because some wishes are too heavy to speak aloud. The way a mother and daughter keep showing up for each other even when neither of them is sure how the story ends.
Hart has made a film that understands adolescence not as a costume but as a condition of radical uncertainty. Don’t Say Good Luck is tender without being soft, emotional without being manipulative. It earns its tears the old-fashioned way: by telling the truth about people who are trying, imperfectly, to love each other while the clock is running. (Neo, 2026)