Chemical Hearts (2020)

Chemical Hearts arrives from the summer of 2020, a year in which the theatrical calendar collapsed and small streaming romances were left to fend for themselves. Adapted from Krystal Sutherland's young adult novel, it follows Henry Page, an aspiring writer who wants the editorship of his high school newspaper and instead receives a shared title with Grace Town, a transfer student who walks with a cane, speaks in monosyllables, and carries a grief she will not name. Richard Tanne directs with patience and a fondness for 35mm grain. The result is sincere, unhurried, and entirely disinclined to instruct anyone about anything.

The film's representational gestures are modest and largely structural. Grace's disability is a consequence of the crash that killed her boyfriend, which means the cane functions as a plot mechanism, a visible marker of invisible damage, instead of a statement about bodies. The supporting cast is diverse in the quiet manner of a New Jersey high school, and race is never raised as a subject. Grace's interiority is filtered almost entirely through Henry's longing, a limitation several critics observed and the film never corrects. Her depression and trauma are rendered as atmosphere, as mood, as weather, not as a clinical condition demanding vocabulary. No characters are queer. No one mentions the climate. The abandoned factory with its koi pool is a romantic location, not an economic indictment.

The film's thematic ambitions are emotional. Henry's essay on the biochemistry of teenage heartbreak is the closest thing to a thesis, and it arrives as a feeling instead of a lesson. Grace wears a wedding dress in a koi pond and the camera does not scold her for it. A taped-together Neruda poem passes between them in a hallway at the end. This is a film about two young people being sad near each other, and it has the good sense not to turn that into a sermon.