Chem­i­cal Hearts

There’s a plague sweep­ing our most telegenic B‑listers. The symp­toms often change and the vic­tims vary in pro­file aside from their cam­era-friend­ly good looks, but the fatal­is­tic sense of tragedy and gin­ger­ly curat­ed indie pop sound­tracks mark an unmis­tak­able pat­tern link­ing these cases.

Patient zero was The Fault in Our Stars, its $300 mil­lion gross cre­at­ing a viral hotspot that’s since racked up a body count includ­ing Five Feet Apart, All the Bright Places, The Space Between Us, Every­thing Every­thing, Then Came You and Mid­night Sun. In all instances, an ail­ment claims the life of one half of a ten­ta­tive ado­les­cent flir­ta­tion, leav­ing the sur­vivor with a valu­able les­son about the pre­cious­ness of our time on Earth. Even in a pan­dem­ic, the fetishi­sa­tion of death has refused to go out of style.

Chem­i­cal Hearts arrives as the lat­est teen weepie to be thrown onto the pile with the oth­ers. Its pri­ma­ry func­tion appears to be ush­er­ing Lili Rein­hart, the girl next door on TV’s Riverdale and a recent break­out as one of Hus­tlers scam­ming strip­pers, into a big-screen lead­ing role. Her first-time pro­duc­er cred­it con­firms as much. It doesn’t make the strongest argu­ment for her via­bil­i­ty as an autonomous star, how­ev­er. Just as her char­ac­ter Grace limps around on her sym­bol­ic wound­ed leg, Rein­hart strug­gles to com­plete basic actor­ly func­tions under writer/​director Richard Tanne’s stilt­ed dialogue.

Grace sus­tained that injury in a car crash before leav­ing her pre­vi­ous town, an inci­dent that killed her boyfriend and left her with some heavy-duty survivor’s guilt. Her fam­i­ly relo­cates to idyl­lic Nowhere, USA, and it’s here that she encoun­ters Hen­ry (Austin Abrams), who’s some­how the main char­ac­ter. He’s the one to open the film with an insuf­fer­able voiceover mono­logue about the neu­ro­chem­istry of feel­ings, and in due time, he’ll be the one to facil­i­tate Grace’s accep­tance of her grief.

Their inevitable star-crossed dal­liance feels strange­ly trans­ac­tion­al, a deal in which she gets to process her trau­ma and he gets to taste the exquis­ite bit­ter­sweet­ness of adult­hood for the first time (along with get­ting his V‑card punched). There’s an imma­ture solip­sism in the film’s approach to love as a thing you do in order to grow per­son­al­ly, rather than a mutu­al meeting-in-the-middle.

The pair treat each oth­er like ter­tiary char­ac­ters in their own sto­ries, peo­ple who exist only in terms of what emo­tion­al nour­ish­ment they can pro­vide. The film’s sen­ti­men­tal atti­tude towards sui­cide, paint­ed here as a beau­ti­ful­ly ter­ri­ble act that can give some­one else’s life mean­ing, pro­motes the same irre­spon­si­ble per­spec­tive that got TV series 13 Rea­sons Why pil­lo­ried and re-edited.

At one point, Grace rat­tles off a laun­dry list of clas­sics about moody young peo­ple in a seem­ing attempt from Tanne to place him­self among their ranks. The two major titles she name-checks are ​‘The Sor­rows of Young Werther’, the cli­max of which inspired a rash of copy­cat sui­cides across Europe, and ​‘The Catch­er in the Rye’, a peren­ni­al favourite of assas­sins and school shoot­ers. No one involved with this pro­duc­tion realised that the stakes of their sto­ry are much high­er than the rela­tion­ship sta­tus of its main couple.