Five Feet Apart: Film Review

Synopsis

Five Feet Apart follows the story of Stella Grant (Haley Lu Richardson), a control-obsessed teenager with OCD, and Will Newman (Cole Sprouse), a rebellious and standoffish teenager. Both Stella and Will have cystic fibrosis. A consequence of that affliction, people with CF cannot come within six feet of each other. Because of this, Stella and Will's love for each other is lacking one essential thing: human touch.

Review

To start, the story is overstuffed though compelling. It is chock-full of melodrama and subplots that I will get to later. It follows the same conventions as sick teen romances: they meet in a hospital, they fall in love, one of them almost dies, etc. It is nothing new. In fact, it is almost a derivative of 2014's The Fault In Our Stars. The script feels very contrived and morbid. It asks too many unanswerable questions about life (It talks about life way more than it should), love, and loss. Not shockingly, but there is unusually great cinematography for this type of film. There is great character work done in this film. The first hour or so focuses on developing the characters and their pathos. Haley Lu Richardson and Moises Arias are standouts in this film.  With Arias' Poe in the scene, we see Richardson's Stella at her happiest and most content, and at her most depressed and heartbreaking. Cole Sprouse eventually shows emotion, but for most of the film, he is very wooden and stiff. The film gets very melodramatic in the third act, really the last thirty to forty-five minutes. All happening over two nights, several important events happen that bring the film down tonally. It creates a very dark shift that splits the film into two different ones: a romance drama and a Lifetime movie. It is very sad. I would be lying if I said I didn’t almost cry. It's a little overkill.