So we have yet another film adapted from a young adult romance novel. This time it’s Everything Everything , based on a book by the same name by Nicola Yoon. I haven’t read the book so I won’t be able to draw comparisons. But the film centres round Maddy (Amandla Stenberg), a young 18-year-old girl with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) who cannot leave the house. Her mother (Anika Noni Rose), who’s also the doctor treating her, has created a safe environment to keep her daughter indoors. Olly (Nick Robinson) has just moved in next door with his family. And the two soon start talking to each other, first via text then calls and even sneak in a meeting against Maddy’s mother’s wishes. Forbidden love is the sweetest and our two protagonists fall hard for each other.
- Director: Stella Meghie
- Starring: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose
- Run time: 96 minutes
Everything Everything looks a lot and perhaps even wants to be like The Fault in Our Stars (2014) but fails to elicit the emotion that director Josh Boone managed with his adaptation. In this film, we’ve got two very uninteresting people falling in love, and we just keep wondering why. Maddy, whose identity is her disease, is a caricature of a real girl. She’s got no spark or wit. At one point, Maddy tells her mother that Olly thinks she’s funny, beautiful and smart. Yet, not once does the character utter anything remotely humorous. We’re simply shown a (sickeningly) sweet, innocent girl who’s for the most part wearing virginal white with a few instances of pale blues and yellows. Then there’s Olly, a young man always clad in black, who’s smitten with the sick girl (perhaps the result of a pseudo-saviour complex). The only character insight we’re given is that he’s cynical because of an unstable environment at home. It’s not a terribly good thing if the lead characters of a film are so unidimensional.
At no point do you ever feel anything within the ballpark of empathy towards a sick young girl or her boyfriend stuck in an abusive situation. In addition to her bland protagonists, director Stella Meghie manages to sterilise the most dramatic moments in the film. The final showdown between Maddy and her mother about a huge secret ends up being subdued, austere even.
Everything Everything is boring, embarrassingly corny and cheesy. Don’t brave watching this one unless you’re curious to see what happens after 90 plus minutes of constant eye rolls.
