Amandla Stenberg Risks It All for Love in ‘Everything, Everything’ Trailer
“It’s like Me Before You meets Bubble Boy.” While I am confident that this is not how things went down in the pitch meeting for the upcoming young-adult-geared romance Everything, Everything, the description’s still fundamentally accurate.
Amandla Stenberg (a rising star with credits in The Hunger Games, The Birth of a Nation, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade visual album) stars as Maddy, a #teen who has spent her entire life within the safe, climate-controlled confines of her tech’d-out home. And just as love eventually drew Jake Gyllenhaal out from his insulated plastic bubble, so too does crush-worthy hunk Olly (Nick Robinson, the jerky older brother from Jurassic World) drive Maddy to venture out into the world. Will she say some snappy one-liner drawing a distinction between living and actually having a life? You bet she will!
It’s when the newly released trailer touts the film as “from the studio that brought you Me Before You and If I Stay” that everything starts to click. Of course Maddy flees her home and the tyrannical hand of her maid-firing mother, and of course the love between Maddy and Olly is too sweet to last. Their courtship of chastely flirtatious text messages and window photo collages crumbles when Maddy dares to challenge her illness for the first — and what might be the last — time in her life. Director Stella Meghie (her only other credit being SXSW breakout Jean of the Joneses) piles on the pathos as Maddy succumbs to the sickness and tries to savor the moments she has left with Olly. The teen weepie comes to theaters on May 19. Don’t forget your hankie.