Every Day

Have you ever imag­ined what it would be like to wake up every day in a dif­fer­ent body? This is the real­i­ty for a chameleon­ic teen named A in Michael Sucsy’s lame roman­tic dra­ma, Every Day. But what is A? Good ques­tion. A is a non-gen­dered per­son­al­i­ty whose only con­stant between all these bod­ies is an Insta­gram account full of self­ies – each one a por­trait of the per­son they have inhabited.

The film begins as A wakes up in the body of bull­ish jock Justin (Jus­tice Smith) and attempts to live that day for him, with­out leav­ing a trace. Things are all going smooth­ly until A meets Justin’s girl­friend, Rhi­an­non (Angourie Rice), and falls des­per­ate­ly in love with her.

It takes an unre­al­is­tic num­ber of meet-cutes with A in dif­fer­ent bod­ies over the fol­low­ing days for Rhi­an­non to final­ly break things off with Justin. It takes her an even less real­is­tic amount of con­vinc­ing to believe that A is, in fact, all of those strangers, and is indeed a body-swap­ping enti­ty and that she too is in love with them. The resul­tant rela­tion­ship is punc­tu­at­ed by clichéd lines, gag-induc­ing gig­gles and spark­ly-eyed grins.

The film’s attempt­ed mes­sage that love tran­scends appear­ances is sweet. How­ev­er, even though A inhab­its an eth­ni­cal­ly diverse array of peo­ple of all gen­ders, they always hap­pen to be in the body of a hand­some young man when it comes to a pro­longed roman­tic scene. Got to tick those het­ero­nor­ma­tive teen romance boxes.

The moral­i­ty of A inter­fer­ing in the lives of those they inhab­it, or Rhiannon’s par­ents’ own rocky mar­riage could have added some much-need­ed heft to this feath­erlight YA dra­ma. Instead, plot points appear to wrap them­selves up with a ludi­crous sim­plic­i­ty – and all to a thump­ing sound­track of cheesy pop hits.

When the cou­ple real­ly do have some­thing to wor­ry about, it is approached with an unnec­es­sary, flash-for­ward sequence in which the teen pro­tag­o­nist is made to look ​‘old’ by giv­ing her a pair of glass­es and some wine. Just in case you didn’t realise that this was scene was meant to be a sad moment, the soul-suck­ing­ly grey colour­ing ham­mers the tragedy home. The crude, Snapchat-like fil­ters (unfor­tu­nate­ly) don’t stop here – anoth­er scene lat­er con­vey­ing sun­ny joy is giv­en a gar­ish yel­low haze around the edges. These visu­al choic­es feel ran­dom and bizarre among the oth­er­wise con­ven­tion­al cinematography.

Despite the intrigu­ing premise, the pre­dictable plot and abun­dance of corn entire­ly grates away the film’s few redeem­ing qualities.