There should be a subgenre for the romance movies about lovestruck people with illnesses. The first that comes to my mind is “A Walk to Remember.” I remember vividly “Love and Other Drugs,” which covers a lot more ground but at the film’s core is a woman with an illness who falls in love. The most recent one is “The Fault in Our Stars.”
These films really have a soft spot in my heart. Having a sickness of my own, no matter how good or bad these films are, they tug at my heartstrings.
It’s a formula that’s quite easy to maneuver. Set up the character with the illness, make them fall in love, and then have the condition or the disease cause conflict. It’s hard to not do this well, and “Everything, Everything” manages to keep it all together to give a satisfying experience despite its many directorial flaws.
‘Everything, Everything” has a fable quality to its story. Maddy Whittier has Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), which means her immune system is so weak that living outside would put her life at risk. So her mother, who is a doctor, has kept her indoors her whole life.
She has never set foot outside her house in fear of catching an infection or bacteria or a virus that could kill her. Her only friend is the day nurse, Carla, who comes in when her mother is at work.
Everything changes when Maddy sees a teen, Olly, move into the house next door. Their eyes lock and there’s instant attraction here. Their windows are right across each other and a friendship begins, which quickly turns into romance.
“Everything, Everything” hits all the right notes. Amandla Stenberg and Nick Robinson, who play Maddy and Olly respectively, are charming and relatable.
Stenberg gets better as the movie progresses because outside of the romantic aspects of the film, this is also the story of a young girl who has never been outside. She captures that innocence well, and as the trailer suggests, as she leaves her home to finally have a life, the world is new to her. Her eyes and smile telegraph all of this. It’s actually very well performed.
The difficulties come with Stella Meghie’s direction. Everything from the music to the production design gives us the feeling of a fable. This is a clean world with bright lighting and everyone says the right things at the right time.
Narrative points fall into place when they have to so it feels counter to the the rest of the film when her camera work is rough and frenetic. There are scenes where the camera is handheld and it feels wrong.
Another example is when Maddy and Olly finally get to speak face to face and their inner monologue appears as subtitles. There’s already so much going on with the two actors and what their characters are going through that the addition of the subtitles just made the scene too busy.
There is a lovely gimmick, though, that Meghie uses where their text conversations transpire in a fantasy world of Maddy’s making.
She is taking up architecture online and she is constantly building models. When the young couple text or talk on the phone, they appear together in these models so we don’t get bogged down from having to read these long exchanges. It’s a nice touch and it brings out the film’s fable-like story into play.
But regardless of these fantastical touches, the movie is dead set on showing the severity of Maddy’s SCID and it always hangs there like a sword. We know she is going to leave that house to spend a day with Olly in the best possible way but at what cost? Despite Meghie’s difficulty with certain aspects of the first act, she handles the second act pretty well and the film still manages to surprise and tug at the heart strings.
Without the star power of a Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, which did very well for “Fault in Our Stars,” I’m not sure if “Everything, Everything” would rank highly in this subgenre of romantic movies. It definitely does not have the same punch as “A Walk to Remember,” But “Everything, Everything” does have its moments.
It surely makes you feel the thrill of falling madly in love, and that’s all we really want from these kinds of films, right?
