Everything, Everything (2017)

Directed by: Stella Meghie | 92 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Ana de la Reguera, Taylor Hickson, Danube Hermosillo, Dan Payne, Fiona Loewi, Sage Brocklebank, Robert Lawrenson, Peter Benson, Françoise Yip, Farryn VanHumbeck, Marion Eisman, Allison Riley, Valareen Friday

Jamaican-American writer Nicola Yoon rose to fame in 2015 thanks to her debut novel ‘Everything, Everything’. She was inspired by the birth of her daughter. The book should reflect her child on the pages, she thought. The concerns she had for her daughter as a new mother, and the powerful need to protect the child from danger, gave her the idea to write a story about a seventeen-year-old girl who needs such unconditional protection as a newborn child. It took her three years to finish the book, because besides her family life and her busy job as a programmer at an investment company, she only had time to write in the mornings. Her husband, Korean-American graphic designer David Yoon, illustrated her story. “Everything, Everything” came in at number one on The New York Times bestseller list – the Young Adult hardcover category – and spent 40 weeks on the US best-selling book list.

As is often the case with bestsellers, ‘Everything, Everything’ (2017) has now also been made into a feature film. Relatively inexperienced Canadian filmmaker Stella Meghie, who debuted a year older with the modestly released but well-received ‘Jean of the Joneses’ (2016), took the director’s chair and the young talent Amandla Stenberg (Rue from ‘ The Hunger Games’, 2012). She plays Madeline ‘Maddy’ Whittier, a teenage girl confined to her home due to a serious immune system disorder – severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID – spends her days taking courses on the internet and daydreaming. Contact with the outside world is out of the question, so her mother (Anika Noni Rose) doesn’t allow her to go outside. The only people she sees, besides her mother, are nurse Carla (Ana de la Reguera), who has cared for her for fifteen years while her mother is working at the hospital, and her daughter Rosa (Danube Hermosillo). But then Maddy’s life is turned upside down when the new neighbors arrive. Her attention is immediately drawn to the family’s son, Olly (Nick Robinson), whom she watches from her bedroom window and with whom she has eye contact just too long. Cautiously, the first (online) contact is made, but when the feelings these two teenagers have for each other intensify, Maddy is willing to take all health risks for granted and ignore her mother’s emphatic advice; she must and will be with Olly!

‘Everything, Everything’ is aimed at a teenage audience that likes to swoon over sugary sweet melodrama about an impossible love. Especially in the first half of the film, Meghie manages to intrigue her viewers with the budding love and the cautious attempts to make overtures. She keeps it light-hearted thanks to playful tricks, such as making chat messages appear on screen, fantasy sequences where Maddy and Olly can actually be together in an alternate reality, and the scene from Woody Allen’s ‘Annie Hall’ where something is said differently than expected (which the viewer knows thanks to subtitles). Meghie can also lean on a convincing Amandla Stenberg, who knows how to keep her eyes open without any effort and who makes the naive, other-worldly Maddy appear sympathetic and sincere. Unfortunately, ‘Everything, Everything’ gets out of hand in the second half. This is mainly due to the remarkable leaps that J. Mills Goodloe’s screenplay makes. Goodloe, who has enough experience in the romantic comedy genre with the scripts of, among others, ‘The Best of Me’ (2014) and ‘The Age of Adeline’ (2015) to his credit, thought it necessary to remove all clichés from the genre and make some serious mistakes with regard to continuity. To top it all off, the film comes up with a plot twist that completely undermines all the above and leaves the viewer deceived. Had Goodloe kept it ‘smaller’, we would certainly have awarded this film an extra full point.