Teenage terminal illness: it’s so romantic, isn’t it? Apart from the dying bit. And the physical deterioration, the pain, and the medical intervention that often precedes it. But as a movie genre, it ticks so many boxes: despair, alienation, suffering, seize-the-day recklessness, inbuilt tragedy. Basically all the things teenagers experience already, minus an easy excuse to dismiss them. No wonder dying-teen movies seem to be going, er, viral right now.
Next up is Five Feet Apart, whose attractive leads, Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse, both have cystic fibrosis – a genetic condition that leads to buildup of fluid in the lungs. More than half of sufferers die before they reach 28 years old. To prevent cross-infection, people with CF must not come within six feet of each other, hence the title: when these two fall in love, they decide to steal back a foot’s worth of intimacy.
The sight of beautiful, able-bodied actors wearing breathing tubes and living for the moment might bring to mind the 2014 hit The Fault in Our Stars, which put young cancer patients Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort on a similar trajectory. Or it might bring to mind Everything, Everything, in which Amandla Stenberg’s immune disorder prevents her from leaving the house, let alone necking in McDonald’s. Or maybe Now Is Good (Dakota Fanning, leukaemia), or Midnight Sun (Bella Thorne, xeroderma pigmentosum – she cannot go out in sunlight). Tragic youthful romance is a tale as old as Romeo and Juliet, or at least Macaulay Culkin’s My Girl, but clearly, these movies are striking a chord. Could it be that today’s teens are feeling more doomed than ever? Or that this is the only first-world problem left to rebel against?
As well as becoming more commonplace, terminal-teen romances are becoming more medical, which is a double-edged sword. It is difficult to sneer at a movie about a real illness, even one that’s riddled with cliches (how many more shots of lovers pressing hands together but separated by a pane of glass do we really need to see?), and leaves less photogenic symptoms off-screen in favour of a good-looking corpse.
Five Feet Apart has already drawn some criticism for glamourising CF, and promoting dangerous practice (the “six feet” rule is there for a good reason). But it is more upfront than most. The story, set entirely within a hospital, does not shy away from the oppressive treatment regime. And in one brave scene, the two lovers strip to their underwear and show each other their numerous scars and tubes. When you’re not allowed to get within a pool cue’s length of each other, it doesn’t get much more intimate than that. We tend to think of romance and reality as opposites, but get it right and you can have both.
