Emma D’Arcy, known for playing Rhaenyra Targaryen in HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” has been cast in “Last Train Home,” a U.K. short film from director Jessi Gutch, rooted in Gutch’s own experience of living with incurable cancer.
D’Arcy will play Eve, a woman who reconnects with a childhood friend caught between the living and the dead. Straddling a hospice bed and a steam train populated by ghosts, the film is pitched by its makers as a “coming-of-death” story – an attempt to portray dying as an extended, multifaceted human experience rather than a discrete event.
Gutch’s illness is the project’s foundation. At 27, she received a diagnosis in 2019 that her ovarian cancer had reached her liver and spleen, and underwent chemotherapy in wards shared with terminally ill patients. When the disease returned and was declared incurable during the 2020 lockdown, she channelled the experience into “The Forgotten C,” a semi-autobiographical short helmed by Molly Manning Walker that earned a BIFA nomination. In the years since, she has immersed herself in questions of how death can be approached spiritually without religious doctrine – among other things, researching deathbed phenomena, the widely documented experience of dying people encountering visions of those who have already passed.
The film crystallized during a two-week residency at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, the remote coastal headland that served as the home of the late artist-filmmaker Derek Jarman. The location – Britain’s only desert, where sparse natural life meets heavy industrial infrastructure – provides both the visual setting and a thematic undercurrent. Donna McKevitt, a longtime Jarman collaborator who wrote the album “Translucence” with him and contributed to the soundtrack of his final film “Blue,” has signed on to compose the score.
“Cinema almost entirely avoids the dying process, reducing it to a final gasp or an act of bloody violence,” said Gutch. “But death is layered, messy, frightening, beautiful and often profoundly connective. This film exists because I’ve lived inside that space, and because so few stories allow us to stay there.”
The film is co-produced by Cat Marshall of Commonplace Films and actor-producer Victoria Emslie of Primetime, operating under the banner Last Train Home Ltd. With a budget of £72,000 ($97,000), the production is currently in financing.
“‘Last Train Home’ is not just a film, it is an invitation into the freedom that comes from remembering how to live through accepting one’s mortality,” said Emslie. “One day we will all board the train home; in accepting this, we might finally live without fear. Art can make these truths easier to hold.”
The project has been accepted into the fiscal sponsorship scheme run by Breaking Through the Lens, a non-profit that supports gender equality in film at the financing stage. The creative team has been assembled to reflect that mandate. Shaheen Baig, whose casting credits include “Aftersun” and “Adolescence,” is attached as casting director. BAFTA Breakthrough 2025 honoree Nathalie Pitters serves as director of photography, Lucie Red is production designer, Nse Asuquo is editor, and Ines Adriana joins as sound designer. Molinare is providing in-kind post-production support and Panavision is supplying camera equipment.
Shoshana Ungerleider, M.D., joins as executive producer. Ungerleider previously exec produced the Oscar-nominated documentaries “End Game” and “Extremis,” and is the founder of endwellproject.org, a nonprofit focused on reimagining end-of-life care.
“Projects like ‘Last Train Home’ open a space we rarely allow ourselves to enter,” said Ungerleider. “They invite us to look directly at dying – not with fear or distance, but with curiosity, tenderness, and humanity.”
Breaking Through the Lens CEO and founder Daphne Schmon described the film as exemplifying “brave, values-led filmmaking,” saying Gutch brings “rare tenderness and honesty to the dying process.”
The production is also pushing back against standard industry working conditions. Citing a Film & TV Charity Looking Glass Survey in which 80% of disabled respondents said they were considering leaving the industry over mental health pressures, the team has committed to 7+1 hour shoot days and will engage End of Life Doula U.K. to provide doula support for all cast and crew.
The filmmakers situate the project within what they see as a wider social reluctance to confront mortality. A 2023 U.K. study found that a majority of people – 58% – regard death and bereavement as a subject too uncomfortable to raise, while a U.S. survey placed death at the bottom of a ranking of topics people are willing to discuss openly, below sex, money and religion, with just 32% prepared to engage with it.
Gutch’s debut documentary feature “Blue Has No Borders” premiered in the International First Feature Competition at Sheffield DocFest 2025 and was longlisted for the BIFA Debut Documentary Director Award. Her debut fiction feature, “My Cells Are Trying to Kill Me,” is in development with the BFI, produced by Loran Dunn of Delaval Film. “Last Train Home” previously won The Pitch Fund’s Best Drama Prize and was a finalist in both For the Silver Screen’s Analog Short Film Fund and Primetime’s Empower Fund.
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