Save me from myself but I went to see the deeply terrible teen-girl-with-weird-affliction romance weepy Midnight Sun. In this flick, Bella Thorne plays a girl with Xeroderma Pigmentaurous (XP), a skin disease where any amount of sunlight could be deadly. She grows up in a small town outside Seattle, with one friend, home-schooled, sleeping during the day, up all night. She then meets a boy.
The romantic interest is played by Patrick Schwarzenegger (!?!!!?!!) who manages to have less screen presence than Scott Eastwood. Maybe he’ll get better. Bella Thorne – who is unconvincing but normally a better actress than this – plays the girl and comedic Rob Riggle does a terrible job playing her dad. Rob Riggle is good in comedies, but terrible as a concerned and emotionally wrought dad. It doesn’t help the movie’s writing is both super generic, unintentionally hammy and awkward, and unconvincing.
My biggest problem is that there’s no real problem in Bella Thorne’s life other than she can’t go out in the sun. This creates an impossibly unconvincing impediment to her relationship with her boyfriend. I hate to tell the screenwriters, but you can stay awake all day in a house with shutters and still have life after the sun goes down. That’s not the world’s worst problem when you are a sharp, smart, funny, and beautiful girl in a modern western society with all the technology to keep you safe. This isn’t a minor quibble either since the emotional crisis of the movie hinges on whether she tells her boyfriend that she can’t go out in the sun. Couples have survived far worse problems.
Anyhow, she does get about thirty seconds of sunlight due to a broken watch (and not telling her boyfriend she can’t survive sunrise) and gets Movie Cancer. OK, it’s not movie cancer but it’s the equivalent… her “brain contracts” from the exposure, she gets an unconvincing hand tremor, and some extra eye shadow.
I looked up the disease online… real symptoms include:
Severe sunburn when exposed to the smallest amount of sunlight
Rough-surfaces growths and skin cancers
Painfully sensitive eyes that are bloodshot and clouded
Blistering or freckling
Spider veins
Scaly skin
Dry skin
Corneal ulcerations
Needless to say, extra eye shadow on Bella Thorne does not equal the frightening images on the Wikipedia page.
So, hey, what else is new? Actresses with movie cancer never look bad. They always suffer and glow with perfect skin since the romance hinges on this perfectly tragic love story. This movie isn’t the first to commit this crime…
But everything else in the movie is just as hammy and unconvincing.
There are better teen romance movies. The Fault in Our Stars is all about beutiful teens with cancer and its great. There are other movies that are perfectly ok about teen girls (and sometimes boys) with random disorders that make them weird… Everything, Everything last year is about a girl who can’t go outside at all since she’s allergic to everything. Every Day is about a boy(?) who makes up in another body every day even after falling in love. The Space Between Us is about a kid who grows up on Mars, falls in love with an girl on Earth, but can’t handle our gravity or diseases. Plenty of teen romances handle their sometimes arbitrary barriers and are perfectly ok.
This movie is really just cringey and terrible.
Score: 60