All of this comes together in the film’s final moments, when Marie collapses in her lab and is rushed to the hospital. As she goes in and out of consciousness, she sees all that her discovery has wrought, culminating in a reunion with her beloved husband Pierre, who by then has been dead for nearly 28 years. Marie Curie died in 1934. There’s no way she could actually have known about the atomic bomb, let alone how governments would choose to wield it. Nor could she have known about the gross mishandling of the Chernobyl disaster, which claimed hundreds of lives. Likewise, chemotherapy only really entered the testing stages in the 1940s. But again — this isn’t a biopic. By taking the audience on a journey through the history of radioactivity, rather than simply focusing on Curie’s biography, Satrapi manages to bring the abstract concepts of a scientific discovery to life. But she also forces her protagonist to engage with her legacy, confronting her with uncomfortable truths that are at odds with her original intent in unleashing this science into the world.