Film Review – Five Feet Apart

Movies about teen romances and elongated disasters are usually inspired by YA fiction, where there’s never a shortage of tales about adolescent woe. “Five Feet Apart” has enjoyed a slightly different origin story, beginning life as a screenplay before it was turned into a novel (released last November). It’s a pleasant change of pace, offering screenwriters Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis an opportunity to develop distinct subplots instead of trying to pack the vastness of a literary offering into a single picture. That doesn’t mean the feature is a memorable effort, but it’s a refreshingly direct one, finding the right balance of character and setting to give viewers a full understanding of motivation and longing. Such simplicity ends up frightening the filmmakers, but “Five Feet Apart” does connect as a something gentle, periodically invested in real feelings of frustration and attraction that sustain when the third act goes haywire with melodrama. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com