93 min | R | August 21, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Henry Page is seventeen and has never had anything worth writing about. Then Grace Town transfers in with a cane and a grief she will not name, and Henry decides her pain is exactly the material he has been waiting for. He wants a muse. She is a person.
Henry Page is seventeen and has never felt anything worth writing about. He edits his high school newspaper and waits for a life that will hand him material. Grace Town transfers in walking with a cane and refusing to explain why. The two get assigned to run the paper together, and Henry decides her damage is the experience he has been missing. Chemical Hearts presents itself as a first-love story. It is really about a boy who mistakes someone else’s grief for his own coming-of-age.
Austin Abrams plays Henry with a soft eagerness that curdles into entitlement. He wants Grace to be the wound that turns him into a real writer, and Abrams lets that selfishness show through the sweetness. Lili Reinhart plays Grace Town as a closed door. She gives Grace a flat affect that reads as depth early and as evasion later, and the performance holds both. Bruce Altman plays Henry’s father Toby with a quiet decency the screenplay barely uses. Sarah Jones plays Sadie, Henry’s older sister, and lands the only adult perspective on what Henry refuses to see.
Richard Tanne directs and adapts Krystal Sutherland’s novel, and he leans on Henry’s voiceover to carry meaning the images already deliver. The narration names feelings the scenes have shown, and it flattens subtext into statement. Tanne shoots the suburban autumn in a cold and muted palette that fits the mood and never shifts from it. He cuts to dreamy montage every time the relationship deepens, and the montages trade development for atmosphere. The needle-drop soundtrack does emotional work the script should be doing on its own. Tanne has a good eye and an overwritten ear.
Chemical Hearts works hardest when it stops narrating and lets Reinhart sit in silence. Those moments suggest the harder film underneath, the one about a girl whose loss is not a plot device for someone else’s growth. The script keeps pulling back to Henry, and Henry is the least interesting person in his own story. The earnestness is genuine and the leads commit to it completely. What undercuts the film is its faith in the tropes it should be questioning. It mistakes a familiar arc for an honest one.