#CHEMICAL HEARTS MOVIE#

He is immediately fascinated by Grace and they begin to form a tentative friendship, despite her unwillingness to open up emotionally.Ĭhemical Hearts slots pretty conventionally into the pantheon of slightly moody teen romances, lacking the acerbic spark of something like The Edge of Seventeen or even the luminously amiable cheese of Disney+’s recent Stargirl. That changes when he is made editor of the student paper during his senior year and is asked to work with Grace (Lili Reinhart), who has transferred from a nearby school in the wake of an accident that has left her with serious damage to her knee.

#CHEMICAL HEARTS MOVIE#

The movie opens with a mildly insufferable opening monologue from Austin Abrams’s protagonist Henry, who declares that “nothing interesting or remarkable had ever happened to me”, echoing just about every teenage movie character ever. It’s an overwrought, but ultimately likeable, take on the strange, embryonic struggles of young love, particularly when grief enters into the mix. Richard Tanne’s Chemical Hearts, adapted from the novel by Krystal Sutherland, lands somewhere between the two. Some douse the entire thing in soft focus camerawork to romanticise the heck out of every moment, while others pile on the cringe in attempting to convey the clumsy romance of teenagers. There’s no shortage of movies about the awkwardness of first love.

The editor of a high school newspaper bonds with a new student who was injured in an accident. Starring Austin Abrams, Lili Reinhart, Sarah Jones, Kara Young, Coral Peña and C.J.

Chemical hearts