‘Come See Me in the Good Light’ Review: Doc Tenderly Traces Poet Andrea Gibson’s Final Year of Life and Love

‘Come See Me in the Good Light’ Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Brandon Somerhalder

Andrea died in July of this year in Megan’s arms, a devastating ending to their story. Come See Me in the Good Light (available on Apple TV) premiered at Sundance several months before and thankfully, Andrea was able to see it on the big screen. It’s difficult to imagine what it must have felt like to watch their whole life in living color, already knowing that it was likely going to end.

It takes incredible strength to embark on making a film while one’s health is deteriorating rapidly. And yet Andrea is a delightful and funny presence onscreen, whether they’re trying to fix their broken mailbox, working on a poem or just joking around with Megan. Andrea’s sincerity and fearlessness serve to lighten the heaviness of their story. We quickly learn that Andrea has ovarian cancer and are forced to watch her body deteriorate before our eyes. But thankfully Andrea’s spirit remains intact as they tell the story of their life and their journey with spoken word poetry. Their poems are simple in language with an undeniable emotional complexity, vulnerably embracing sentiment. A chunk of the film focuses on Andrea’s desire to perform spoken word poetry on stage in front of a crowd one last time. When we finally see them take the stage, it’s a moving, triumphant moment.

Come See Me in the Good Light is relentlessly emotional and intentionally uplifting, with an intimate quality that makes it feel like a home movie. We are rarely treated to such an affectionate portrait of a treasured queer artist embracing the last days of their life with a loving spouse. Knowing how personal the project was to everyone involved — from participants to producers and even the director — wraps the whole film in a palpable sense of warmth. These circumstances make the doc difficult to evaluate in any objective sense — it’s a wonder that it was made at all, and so tenderly.

White skillfully captures a portrait of a queer poet who wanted the world to know how much they loved and were loved by those around them. It’s an unapologetically sentimental film, knowingly pulling at every single heartstring, encouraging us to open up the emotional floodgates and give ourselves over to Andrea’s resilient positivity. Come See Me in the Good Light wants to be life-affirming more than anything else, especially for artists in queer and marginalized communities. The streaming era has not been kind to intimate documentaries like these, buried under mountains of flashier content. Andrea hoped the film would help people in the future, and there’s no doubt that it will, as long as they know where to find it.