Beautiful, Meaningful, Soulful
3 stars
Mini Review:
This movie adaptation of a book for young adults (with the same name) by Lauren Oliver. It tackles beautifully the answers a very popular teenager must seek to question as to why is she being forced to live like Groundhog day the last day of her life. What is wrong with her seemingly perfect life? The music is great and the film set in the Pacific Northwest has a very haunting quality.
Main Review:
Watch out world, this young actor Zoey Deutch is going to be a star.
16 year old popular high schooler, Samantha Kingston and her three best friends go to school on Cupid Day. The girls are invited to a party thrown by a classmate. The girls gang up and bully another classmate who is considered to be weird.
Samantha realises that after the bullying when the girls are returning home, she dies in an accident. But she wakes up again and again until she sets things right and discovers who she really is. It’s a sort of Groundhog Day mixed with mean girls.
At first Samantha cannot believe that ‘this is happening to me’! She goes to school and is unable to stop the bullying of the strange classmate. Lindsey, the ringleader of Sam’s group thinks she’s gone weird. But Sam is unable to explain to the others what is really happening. The third and fourth and fifth time she wakes up again to cupid day, she realises that she needs to change something in order to save herself.
She realises that her perfect life with her perfect friends and her perfect boyfriend is really perfect at all. She sees the meanness in her friends and she wonders why she is a part of it all. She regrets having been mean to her mother by drawing a line at her room door with lipstick and tell her to stay on the other side…Samantha even realises that her perfect boyfriend Rob isn’t really perfect at all. He only says ‘I love you’ only because he knows she wants him to say it when she ‘puts out’ and not because he feels anything.
Samantha realises that she has forgotten how to be nice after she has become popular. She changes, but the dream she wakes from hasn’t. She’s back to square one on Cupid Day. In her confused and angry state she decides that she’s going over the top and behave unlike herself and maybe fate will change.
The narration is in first person and hence rather intimate. At some points you actually begin to wonder if it is your thoughts about life that Sam is talking about. From caring unconditionally, to kindness and so much more…
The music is simply brilliant. It is young and peppy and yet appropriate. From ‘Not yours’ to ‘Dark Liquor’ all the songs are perfect.
The film is shot beautifully, and the setting is hauntingly beautiful. What will surprise you is the strange shudder that will go through you when you realise that the director showed you what was going to happen right at the beginning. Brilliant little touch.
No comments:
Post a Comment