Cancer Kid
2025 · 16m
Directed by Vasili Manikas
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
A schoolyard prank gone wrong convinces ten-year-old Elliot he has terminal cancer, sending him on a desperate, darkly comic quest to make sense of his own mortality.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most films about a kid confronting mortality either wallow in preciousness or swing for cheap laughs—Manikas does neither, instead letting the absurdity of a schoolyard lie collapse into genuine dread, which is genuinely rare and genuinely unsettling.
There's a lineage here—the British social realism of early Shane Meadows, the tonal precision of early Linklater—and Manikas respects it by refusing sentimentality while maintaining formal control over what could easily become maudlin.
The film's engine is that decision to keep Elliot's internal logic intact: we never cut away to adults 'fixing' things, so every moment of his dawning understanding lives entirely in his face and posture, and that restraint is what makes the comedy and the heartbreak both land.
Reviews
Here’s an unthinkable premise: a child prepares for suicide. But Vasili Manikas’16-minute Cancer Kid is a dark comedy that is as funny as it is cute.