Midnight Sun (2018)

Midnight Sun arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of being anything else. Katie, seventeen, suffers from xeroderma pigmentosum, a condition that renders sunlight lethal, so she lives by night and strums guitar in her room. Then a boy with a bad shoulder and a lost swimming scholarship wanders past a Seattle train station, and the machinery of the terminal-illness romance clicks into gear. It is a remake of a 2006 Japanese film, which is the most structurally interesting thing about it. Everything else is borrowed from a shelf that was already dusty in 2006.

The film's cultural ledger is, by any measure, blank. The cast is white, the love story is heterosexual, the setting is affluent and unexamined, and the closest thing to a thesis is that dying young is sad and also photogenic. No character wrestles with identity, no dialogue gestures toward a cause, and no subplot suggests the filmmakers had a message they were itching to deliver. Katie's illness is treated as a plot device, a countdown clock with a nice face. When the script does reach for meaning, it reaches for a sunset and a song.

What remains is a modest, sincere weepie that audiences graded generously and critics did not, largely over its handling of a real medical condition. The film has no interest in politics, no interest in reform, and no interest in us. It wants only to make us cry, and it pursues that goal with a single-mindedness that is almost respectable. There is nothing here to classify beyond the gentle taxonomy of the tearjerker, and after a long day of sorting through more strident vintages, that is its own kind of relief.

A film of zero markers, and zero pretension about it. The cellar is empty, and the cellar is quiet, and the cellar smells faintly of sunscreen.

Woke Score: 0/100 (Not Woke At All). A specimen of pure, uncut pre-2015 romantic tragedy. No social consciousness detected, no agenda, no lecture. Just a girl, a boy, and the cruel indifference of the sun. It is almost nostalgic.

Verdict: An unremarkable young-adult romance with nothing on its mind but heartbreak. The cultural awareness is nil, the progressive sensibility is nil, and the film is at peace with that. Grade: 0 out of 100 degrees of enlightenment. It will not be storming any barricades, but it will make your mother cry, which is a different kind of power. The most socially conscious act in the entire runtime is the choice to let Bella Thorne sing. That is not a compliment. That is an observation. The sun sets, the credits roll, and the culture moves on unbothered. A rare clean slate, and we should treasure it before the next one comes along with something to say.