Despite two perfectly talented fresh-faced leads and all the gloss it can muster, Everything, Everything is bland and obvious storytelling.
Films aimed squarely at teens suffer from one, overbearing, problem; which is that they all must be principally concerned with the one thing that teenagers (ones with enough disposable time and money to be wasted on a teen flick, at least) are principally concerned with: finding someone to date.
Becoming invested in the relationship between two characters is the crux of fictional writing, maybe even all writing about human beings, and when it’s not just essential to the foundation of your story but is, rather, the entirety of your story then you better do it right. Everything, Everything does not do it right.
The most unbearably saccharine of films can be saved by chemistry between its actors and sparks between its characters. Everything, Everything achieves a much more comfortable “meh” effect. Not so much pleasant as it is polished and not so much titillating as it is irritating. The film’s plot revolves around just-turned 18 year-old Maddy and her life-changing romance with the new neighbour boy in the face of severe combined immunodeficiency.
The job here is not to reinvent the wheel, nor should it be, but you do, at least, have to make the wheel go through one full revolution. Everything, Everything has parts of a beginning, a middle and an end but nowhere near enough detail, emotion or reality to make any kind of an impact.
Classics of the genre distract from the simplicity, repetitiveness and predictability of their structure by focussing on dialogue. You may never really care about the characters in those films but you can at least understand why they care about each other. The leads of Everything, Everything skip through the awkwardness and unpredictability of first meeting someone that you come to love, a scenario that requires actual skill to recreate, and fires you straight into the middle of two horny 18 year-olds who really, really want to bone.
It’s almost admirable in its bluntness. Almost. It’s just too easy. It’s too easy to just draw a line from A to B and say “Well, we all know they were heading there anyway, they have to for the story to exist; so why waste time?”
That’s the thing. Everything, Everything isn’t really a film about love or even wanting to love, it’s about wanting the idea of love; a distinction that teens are very often incapable of making, but that’s not really an excuse as to why the screenwriter didn’t either. It’s a film much more about destinations than journeys.
Maddy’s love-at-first-sight is so poorly defined that one of his chief winning characteristics, according to her, is that he “wears black all the time” and a tremendous amount of his behaviour, to anyone over the age of 18 in the audience, will come off as more creepily obsessive than endearing.
Mostly though, it’s a hodgepodge of other people’s slightly better ideas. It hones in on the sick kid romance popularised most notably by The Fault in our Stars and, similarly, sprinkles the slightly edgy teens, who are slightly ahead of the rest of their class in terms of literature, with gooey chips of medical jargon and accompanying self-pity. The idea of having a very rare blood disease appeals, two-fold, to the teenage desires to be special and have a valid reason for being a mopey loner.
It speaks volumes that, even when the protagonist is afflicted with a disease that prohibits physical contact and causes the two lovers to be almost entirely separated by glass barriers, the story still cannot make even the smallest relatable human connection.
Leads Amandla Stenberg and Nick Robinson are pretty adorable and a lot of fun to look at. They carry the film out of, if nothing else, necessity due to its total lack of meaningful supporting characters. The closest thing being the protagonist’s mother, who mostly exists in order to deliver the film’s depressingly predictable third act twist. There may be a point where you find yourself saying “No, they wouldn’t do that. That’s too obvious and stupid” and, regrettably, you will be giving the story far too much credit.
Everything, Everything is as sterile as the hermetically sealed catalogue showroom house in which the characters, and therefore you as a viewer, mostly dwell. Its representation of nature and natural urges is as pre-packaged and squeaky clean as the soundtrack of radio hits from bands who you thought were better than this but aren’t. Just like that never-ending playlist of this summer’s sound, the film itself will be forgotten by most as soon as the leaves start to fall.
Everything, Everything is out now in UK cinemas.
