116 min
8.2
2019
USA
Five Feet Apart is Justin Baldoni’s debut romantic drama written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, which tells us a story about two lovers deprived of the joy of touch.
Haley Lu Richardson (Stella) and Cole Sprouse (Will) play two young patients who suffer from cystic fibrosis but try to build a relationship despite the unlucky circumstances.
Stella has been suffering from this rare disease since childhood, so she has spent all her life, occasionally visiting hospitals to clean her lungs. Therefore, everyone at the hospital she usually visits knows her, and she even found friends there. The girl’s passion is her YouTube channel, where she shares everyday moments during treatment and tells her subscribers about her disease.
Once upon a time, a new patient arrived in her department. A handsome guy named Will is a complete opposite to Stella as he does not follow the hospital schedule and is slightly apathetic. He has cystic fibrosis as well, but at his stage of the disease, he has an increased risk of infecting other patients. Therefore, Stella is strictly forbidden to approach the guy closer than five feet. However, following Stella’s desire to help everyone, she eventually falls in love with Will.
The movie, in general, is much more ironic than it might seem. It resembles The Fault in Our Stars with a similar sad and, at the same time, cheerful tone and an incurable disease as a source of the central conflict. The scriptwriters added another detail to a typical storyline: the characters not only will not live long due to their condition, but they have no chance to feel the joy of tactile communication.
Their love is a dream of any true romantic: it is pure and non-erotic. Those five feet become the obstacle that provokes sensuality, the invisible thread between the characters, an emotional dam.
Of course, at some point, the dam must break through. Unfortunately, at the very climactic moment, Five Feet Apart sinks into the sea of sentimentality. The film basically holds together thanks to Hailey Lou Richardson, a talented young actress from the indie drama Columbus and one of McAvoy's victims in Split. She saves the movie, especially compared to Cole Sprouse, who spends the entire movie with the same look on his face (and, oddly enough, it is better like that).
By the end, Five Feet Apart loses all humor and any connection with reality, and completely plunges into the world of tears and wet napkins. It even seems that the film creators really did not know how their story should end. Therefore, having reached a critical point, they began to tediously summarize everything. Whereas the story did not need that at all.
