David (Tim Roth, PULP FICTION) is a home care nurse who seems to need his patients as much as they need him. After his latest charge Sarah (Rachel Pickup, AKA) dies from AIDS after a long period of invalidity, he can offer no comfort to her relatives but toasts her as his late wife when an engaged couple try to draw him into their celebration. He indulges his new patient John (actor/screenwriter Michael Cristofer, GIA), an architect recovering from a stroke, in his newfound pornography addiction while visiting the man's buildings posing as his brother. When he and John are caught watching pornography on his iPad, the family threatens to sue him for sexual harassment and he is forbidden from seeing John. Unable to be anything but a caregiver, David appeals to his former employer (THE ROCKFORD FILES' Joe Santos) for a job and takes over, at significantly reduced pay, the care of cancer patient Marta (MAD ABOUT YOU' Robin Bartlett). Although Marta, embarrassed and angry over her infirmity, is initially cold to David, she comes to rely on him as the chemo takes a toll on her. Accepting him in spite of (or because of) the reason he was let go from his last job, she implores him to prove how much he cares and understands her pain by helping her end her life.

Slow-moving and composed primarily of scenes captured in sustained static compositions, CHRONIC conveys the protagonist's emptiness in light of some past tragedy that has left him unable to relate to anyone but the terminally ill (the young medical student [VEEP's Sarah Sutherland] with whom he has somewhat of a friendship turns out to be the relative of one of his late patients). It also effectively conveys that indignities suffered by the ill as they give up the care of their body to a stranger, have well-intentioned relatives barging in when they are at their most vulnerable, and the awkwardness of the caregiver caught in between while expected to be supportive by the patient and babysitter by the relatives. The problem is that there is not much else to it. Roth may have looked at the role as an acting challenge being given no more about his character than the audience, but the film is more interested in conveying human misery than doing anything interesting with the character's adapting and integrating aspects of his patients' lives while they are alive and mourning them as his own when they die. The abrupt ending strikes an unintentionally comic nerve because of the way it is executed onscreen here and because the viewer may have predicted that something along those lines would be only possible end to the character's cycle of behavior.