Thursday, July 28, 2022

Five Feet Apart (2019)

IMDb plot summary: A pair of teenagers with cystic fibrosis meet in a hospital and fall in love, though their disease means they must avoid close physical contact.
Directed by Justin Baldoni. Starring Haley Lu Richardson, Cole Sprouse, and Moises Arias.

Five Feet Apart tells the story of a few teenagers with cystic fibrosis who spend their lives in and out of hospitals for infections and other complications. Two of them, Stella and Will, hit it off and strike up a romance despite the risk to their personal health. This came out in 2019, right before most of us got a better concept of how different it was to form or maintain a relationship with someone you couldn't physically be near without endangering yourself. Aside from that unusual little coincidence, there's not a lot really interesting about this movie, aside from it being a welcome representation of chronic terminal illness. It begs an obvious comparison to The Fault in Our Stars, except neither of these characters is nearly as charming as those in that novel, and the moments focusing on these teenagers' fight to live feel saccharine and unearned. Much of the dialogue is overly expository, even about things the audience should be able to pick up, and the acting doesn't do much to overcome it. Overall, would definitely have appealed to me as a teenager myself obsessed with illness, but it's not one of the better examples of the genre.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Five Feet Apart < Spellbound (1945)
Five Feet Apart > Where to Invade Next
Five Feet Apart > I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
Five Feet Apart < Heartbeat
Five Feet Apart < Love's Labour's Lost
Five Feet Apart > The Illusionist (2006)
Five Feet Apart < Onibaba
Five Feet Apart < The Sasquatch Gang
Five Feet Apart > Manhattan
Five Feet Apart < Harry and the Hendersons
Five Feet Apart > My Sassy Girl
Final spot: #2207 out of 3638, or 39%.

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