Before I Fall (2017)

Before I Fall concerns Samantha Kingston, a high school senior who dies in a car crash and wakes up to relive the same February day until she gets it right. The premise is borrowed from Groundhog Day and returned slightly damaged. The film was directed by Ry Russo-Young and written by Maria Maggenti and Gina Prince-Bythewood, so the female vantage point is not accidental. It is a story about teenage girls, their friendships, their casual cruelties, and the social machinery of a suburban high school. The concerns are real and specific. The thesis, however, stays implicit, and the film never stops to announce a politics.

The supporting cast includes a handful of actors of color, the leads are white, and nobody in the screenplay seems to notice either fact. Race does not enter the frame. Neither does sexuality, nor class, nor the environment, nor the question of who deserves to feel good about their body. Juliet Sykes, the ostracized girl at the center of the guilt, is a target of bullying, not a portrait of neurodivergence. What the film offers instead is a moral about kindness, delivered through the machinery of a young adult drama. It wants us to be nicer. It says so plainly, but it says so inside a plot, which softens the sermon.

The result is sincere, modest, and slightly soggy. Zoey Deutch carries it ably. The film lands its emotional beats without much resistance, then fades, the way a Tuesday does. We are left with a competent genre exercise that aspires to tenderness and achieves it, and a lesson about suicide that is earnest, well-meaning, and entirely embedded in the conventions of its own form. It is a film about a girl learning to be good. It is not a film about anything larger than that.