The dying-teenager-romance genre is perhaps one of the weirdest and oddly specific trends I’ve seen coming in Hollywood since The Fault In Our Stars became a hit back in 2014. But it has been an interesting way of giving some young up-and-comers meaty and thoughtful material than a lot of other films aimed at that demo might offer. What separates Five Feet Apart from the likes of The Fault In Our Stars, Everything Everything, Me Before You, or Midnight Sun, is that the disease is cystic fibrosis, and it’s also the one that isn’t based on pre-existing material, instead being an original script by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis.
The one going through the disease is Stella (Haley Lu Richardson). Combined with years of having the disease and her clinical OCD, she is able to micromanage practically every part of her life. She has a specific way of arranging her medication, she keeps a list of things to do, and she even offers advice and education through videos that she makes in YouTube. However, one day she meets Will (Cole Sprouse), a new guy who is a part of a clinical trial for new medication for cystic fibrosis.
As you can imagine, things go pretty much exactly the way you think. She doesn’t particularly care for him at first. She’s careful and calculated. He’s reckless and doesn’t take anything seriously. They have a few encounters before they both break emotional barriers, and they soon fall in love. And of course, given their condition, they are forced to stay six feet apart at all times, never to even touch on another, no matter how much they might want to.
Yes,it’s formulaic, but with a genre as specific as this, it’s the actors and the filmmaking that need to work so it can make these stories with little wiggle-room work. Haley Lu Richardson is an actor that is becoming one of my very favorites recently, and she is excellent here. There’s an openness and vulnerability that is incredibly endearing, and it’s impossible to not get invested as you see her navigate the struggles of the disease through all the steps and medication and treatments she has to go through on a daily basis.
Richardson also has great chemistry with Sprouse, who is also really good. You understand why Will’s approach is vastly different from Stella, and the way their relationship develops feels natural and with a solid grasp on who these two are and why they want to be together. Other actors like Moisés Arias, Kimberly Hebert Gregory, and Parminder Nagra, among others, do a fine enough job, even if their characters feel much more broadly drawn compared to the two leads. I also appreciate how the actors were made up to actually look sick, as opposed to simply being pretty like in a lot of these kinds of movies. They’re exhausted, they’re sweaty, they got bags under their eyes, and they’re constantly coughing up mucus.
The film takes place almost entirely in a hospital, and they make a great use of the location without inheriting the cold, sterile atmosphere that usually comes with it. I also liked how the filmmakers used the six-foot rule to make some solid compositions that utilize the negative space between the characters to subvert the idea of space representing emotional distance as it’s often been used cinematically. It’s a well made film, especially coming from Justin Baldoni, an actor who is directing his first feature length project. Every beat, even the sillier ones in in the latter half, is executed with enough confidence and emotional honesty to sell it.
There’s not much in terms of missteps in Five Feet Apart. It could lose about 15 to 20 minutes, but that extra time hardly kills the movie. I do find the sequence where the “five feet apart” element comes in to be a bit disconcerting. Seriously, kids, just listen to your doctor. Aside from that, the film is an engaging and moving teen romance that did bring me to tears in the end. It delivers exactly what it wanted to, and it does it very effectively for the most part. It might be predictable and by-the-numbers, but it makes everything count for as much it can, and it’s so well performed that it did not bother me in the slightest once everything was said and done. It won’t be something I’ll ever revisit, but I had a good experience with it, and I’m ultimately glad I saw it.