Five Feet Apart (2019)
Review of Five Feet Apart (2019), directed by Justin Baldoni
There used to be so much hype around this movie, but I was never really interested in it. I grew up watching The Suite Life on Deck and watching both Cole and Dylan Sprouse basically grow up on the screen, but had never seen either of them in an adult role. Perhaps it’s fitting that I watched this and Cole Sprouse is still stuck in teenage roles, such as in this one and in Riverdale (which I refuse to watch, no ifs, ands, or buts. You couldn’t pay me to watch Riverdale). I also didn’t realize this until halfway through the movie, but Moises Arias is also in this movie, so it really is a blast from the Disney past in this movie.
Why did you watch this, you may ask? One of my coworkers, who is a romance addict, brought it up as we were chatting and then I got curious. The next day after the conversation I was really bored, and so I pressed play on Netflix and just went for it. Disclaimer before I start this review, though, is that I hate romance.
Anyways, let’s dive into this review!
Content
Our main character in this film is Stella, a cystic fibrosis patient who is very active on social media—we get a lot of shots in this film of her live-streaming and giving awareness to her condition. Her best buddy in the hospital has been Poe, another kid who seems to be here a lot, but then our duo is interrupted with the arrival of a new kid named Will. The title of this movie comes from the fact that the CF patients can’t get within five feet of each other because if they spread an illness from one person to the next, it can kill the next CF patient because their body is unaccustomed to the foreign virus.
This gets really complicated as Stella and Will begin to fall for each other. Will has a tendency to break the rules to begin with and seems to not take his condition seriously, while Stella is fairly vigilant. They bond over their surgeries and shared condition, leading them to have a unique kind of bond, one that only CF patients can understand. But they can’t get within five feet of each other unless they want to accidentally kill each other. They slowly do get closer and closer, but that kiss they yearn for is completely out of touch.
It’s kind of a doomed romance in a way, because we get this feeling that one of them could die at any moment. I imagine the beauty in this film is to see people who have to be isolated because of their condition finding love, albeit it may be brief, and having that human connection that has been denied to them because of CF. While our actors don’t actually have CF, I personally learned quite a bit about what it means to live with it and how these people struggle in their everyday lives. I do not know anyone with CF nor have I really heard anything about it, so this was a learning experience.
I think my qualm with this movie was that it felt completely rushed. It went from one scene to the next, and suddenly we were sprinting towards the end. It all began to blur together to the point where I had to look up the plot afterward to be like “yeah, that happened, now I remember.” I also thought the main couple lacked chemistry; although their story was powerful, I thought it could’ve been more powerful if they had the right chemistry.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a romance movie that’ll make you cry and feel for the characters. Obviously the demographic for this movie might be younger women, but if you’re someone who has a similar disease or even CF itself it’s absolutely great to watch because you're being represented in cinema. I’m not sure if it’s the right representation and claim it so since I am not someone with CF, but to an outsider, like I said, I felt like I gained an appreciation for what these people have to go through. If you have some spare time, then this is a decent movie to watch.
