Stream It Or Skip It: ‘18 Presents’ on Netflix, a Million-Kleenex Weepie About a Pregnant Woman With Terminal Cancer

Italian Netflix movie 18 Presents (18 Regali) is a real hankie-loader, the perfect thing to watch if you’re over-hydrated and under-swollen. It’s about a pregnant woman who learns she has terminal cancer, and maps out gifts for her unborn daughter’s first 18 birthdays. Here’s the kicker: it’s based on a true story, and the baby girl’s father is credited as one of the film’s screenwriters. So the burning question is, will you need 100 tissues while watching it, or 200?

18 PRESENTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 2001. Elisa (Vittoria Puccini) gets the crushing diagnosis. Cut to a few months later, in the hospital nursery. A somber Alessio (Edoardo Leo) plucks baby Anna from the bassinet. It’s just the two of them now. We see home videos featuring birthday cake and pinatas; Anna gets a toy kitchen, a new bike, some diving lessons, a piano she thinks sucks. Soon, she’s on the cusp of 18 (Benedetta Porcaroli), sullen and moody with a mouthy, rebellious streak.

Anna and her dad squabble. She runs off and ends up getting tagged by a car. The driver is — hold onto yer hankies — Elisa! It’s 2001 again, the exact day of her diagnosis. The hospital is not where they go, since Anna’s OK, but rather, back to Elisa and Alessio’s house, the same house where Anna grew up. She starts putting two and two together to get eleventy-nine, because she apparently traveled through time and is now in the presence of her intrauterine self.

Somehow, Anna doesn’t hyperventilate or check herself into the nearest asylum. No, she goes upstairs, sticks her face in her mom’s robe and inhales deeply, as people in movies always do. She somehow manages to move in with her parents, who don’t know they’re her parents, because why would they? She just concocts a sob story and they buy it. Elisa and Alessio work through the complications of her illness; she starts making a list of all the gifts she wants to give her daughter; and Anna just kind of hangs around for months, helping out here and there. Elisa experiences maternal stirrings around Anna, and she might not think about or wonder why, but we know why, and that’s what you call classic dramatic irony, folks. Will Anna inspire her mother to name the baby Anna, putting a mighty deep gash in the fabric of space and time? Will Anna come face-to-face with herself? Will a mystical genie show up to explain everything? No spoilers, but this time loop has gotta give eventually.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: 18 Presents features the type of wot-the-heck supernaturalism of stuff like The Lake House — or, I dunno, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? — crossed with a disease-of-the-week TV movie calculated to make you heave snot across the room as you blubber and wail.

Performance Worth Watching: Hats off to Puccini — who stars in Netflix series The Trial — for showing a reasonably complex range of emotions, which keeps the movie from getting too maudlin or sentimental.

Memorable Dialogue: “Your mom went on a long trip…not a long trip in terms of distance, but a long trip in terms of time.” — Alessio trying to explain death to an eight-year-old

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Happy Belated Mother’s Day, Mom — I got you a crateful of Kleenex!

Despite the fact that it’s a true-blue dyed-in-the-wool grandmommy of a weeper, 18 Presents isn’t overly manipulative. It treats its characters respectfully, doesn’t deviate into cartoonish comedy and unravels the core mystery with surprising conviction. It’s not as predictable as it seems at first glance, save for the inevitable sobbing. There are two types of people in this world: Those that get mad when a movie makes them cry, and those who just give in to the moment and soak the couch and drive the cats out of the room.

Problem is, the movie tends to dramatically loiter during an extra-draggy second act. Structurally, it’s pretty inventive for this type of movie, with its twisty, fractured narrative and occasional surreal flourish. But it doesn’t really stick the landing; these characters just don’t have any profound examinations of self and reality in them. It’s as if the movie exists solely to squeeze the living shit out of our tear ducts, wringing every last dribble of liquid from them with a steady, ruthless hand.

Our Call: SKIP IT, although 18 Presents has me on the fence. It’s better than most shameless tearjerkers, but isn’t quite ambitious enough to transcend the banalities of its genre.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream 18 Presents on Netflix