tek's rating: ½

Five Feet Apart (PG-13)
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First of all I want to say I wasn't sure whether to put my review under "romance" or "drama", but I ultimately chose the latter because there's so much more to the movie than the romance that develops. Anyway, it came out in 2019, and I bought it in 2020, just a little ways into the Covid-19 pandemic, because the title reminded me of "6 feet apart" social distancing guidelines. So I figured it would be an apt time to watch the movie, even though it's not about a pandemic. And as it turns out, the characters in the movie who have cystic fibrosis are meant to stay six feet apart, not five... but the title eventually comes to make sense. I finally got around to watching the movie in 2021, on the day that I got my second vaccine shot.

There's a 17-year-old girl named Stella, who has been in and out of the hospital many times throughout her life. Her best friend is another CF patient named Poe. And they have a caring nurse named Barbara. (There's another nurse named Julie, but she's less important to the plot.) They're also treated by Dr. Hamid (Parminder Nagra). One day, Stella meets a 17-year-old boy named Will, who not only has CF, but a particularly bad infection called B. cepacia, for which he's undergoing a special treatment regimen. He doesn't seem particularly interested in following the regimen, because he's rather pessimistic. At first Stella doesn't really like him, but she soon becomes more interested in getting him to follow the regimen. It seems to me that the relationship had its share of ups and downs throughout the movie, but by the end they're hopelessly in love with each other, of course.

And I guess beyond that, I don't want to spoil anything about the plot. I don't know what else to say about the movie, except that I liked the characters, and all the drama, and the romantic aspect wasn't bad either.


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