David Hastings | Grid / 2018

a beautiful lie

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Hastings (screenwriter and director) Grid / 2018 [26 minutes]

 

Hasting’s short 2018 drama takes us back to the early 1980s when AIDS was described as Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease, a time when not all doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers were yet totally aware that what came to be described as AIDS was not spread by airborne particles or simply touching a diseased individual.

     In a sort of prologue to the piece, Doctor Andrews (Ernest Vernon) explains to a nurse just hired, Angie Wordsworth (Charlie Clarke), that the patient with a red ribbon would round the door handle of his room was dying, but that he personally felt that he was a true failure in not being able to find any way to help cure or even relieve the terrible symptoms the young man inside, Daniel Cole (Steve Salt), was suffering.

     Other doctors would have nothing to do with him, and nurses were terrified of even entering his room. The boy later tells Angie that he can hear them outside his door drawing straws to determine which one has to enter and care for him each day. None of them will touch him without gloves.

     Dr. Andrews spends as much time as possible simply sitting with his patient and speaking to him, and now reassures the new nurse that he is convinced the disease is not communicable through air or touch. He asks her to similarly care for this dying boy by simply spending his last hours with him, chatting and perhaps even presenting him with the letter he was clutching close to him when he entered the clinic.

     Angie turns out to be a more than kind woman, who uses endearments such as sweetie, and love in describing him—the first time Daniel has heard these words addressed to him for ages. Asked about his lover, he points to his head where he now lives, he having died apparently some time before. His parents have not visited him and there seem no longer to be any friends willing to make the voyage to his room.

     Gently, she administers to him, attempting between his heavy coughing, to ask him questions about himself and his previous life. What she sees is a still somewhat handsome but emaciated boy covered with large Kaposi lesions, afraid but still seeing god through the cloudy vision that is left him. When she hands him the letter he brought with him to the hospital, he explains that he can no longer read, and begs her to read it to him. It is clearly from his mother and father.

     She peruses it quickly before attempting to read it, as we get a glimpse of some of the sentences which beg him to stop writing them and insisting that the disease is God’s punishment for his behavior. The homophobic letter represents hate mail insisting that they want nothing more to do with him.

     The kindly nurse, however, lies, recreating a letter that apologizes for the difficulty his parents have had in the past with dealing with his sexuality, but declaring that they now send their love and wishes to him, hoping that he might find comfort and possibly a cure. Angie quietly creates the kind of letter that such a young man might wish for at the moment of his death, such a beautifully mendacious creation that makes one realize that the truth is not always superior.

     Delighted with what he has just heard, he suffers a small coughing fit, as Angie stands to get him some more water from a faucet just a few feet away. When she returns the boy, now sweating intensely, suffers a wonderful hallucination, imagining it is his mother who has returned to see him just before his death. She sits, announcing “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.” Holding his hand and calling him darling, Angie soon perceives that Daniel is no longer breathing.

     Although this British work cannot match the truly profound cinematic works such as Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs (1985), Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies (1985), John Erman’s An Early Frost (1985), and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), made during those early AIDS years in some cases by men who themselves would soon die of the disease, Hastings’ short work of 2018 briefly returns us to that terrible time when hundreds of young men lay dying in beds without any friends or loved ones around them, and when even doctors and nurses were terrified of making contact with them as human beings.

    These individuals not only suffered, as Angie explains to Dan, for no cause of their own making, but suffered an even worse fate because of the blind prejudice and hate of the world around them, along with governments that had so little sympathy for their conditions that they resisted supporting the research it would take to discover drugs to alleviate their suffering; even today similarly denying funds that might even cure the disease which now know is not spread particularly by gay men but through all forms of sex.

     These days, it appears, no one any longer wants to hear of the disease that has killed approximately 44.1 million (according to 2024 statistics) and has infected another 40.8 million people worldwide who are still living with the disease. The current US government has recently cut of funds, yet again, to the African continent where the disease is still most active, and ceased further research funds at a time when a cure is rumored to be imminent.

     Thank heaven for such films that continue to remind at least a few of us of what occurred and what remains to be done.

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).