Kids in Love

When it comes to com­ing-of-age films, the mat­ter of which ones become cul­tur­al touch­stones is quite often down to luck. It’s a hard nut to crack, but gen­er­al­ly speak­ing the most endur­ing tales of the pit­falls of young adult­hood are those with a strong emo­tion­al core, an ensem­ble of ful­ly fleshed-out, inter­est­ing char­ac­ters and real­is­tic sce­nar­ios that don’t feel feath­er-light or superficial.

Despite ini­tial promise thanks large­ly to the charis­mat­ic pres­ence of stars Will Poul­ter and Cara Delev­ingne, Kids in Love nev­er comes close to being a stand­out entry in the genre. As a por­trait of one young man’s exis­ten­tial cri­sis dur­ing his gap year, Chris Foggin’s fea­ture debut is about as riv­et­ing as most menial jobs peo­ple find them­selves stuck in dur­ing that pre-uni­ver­si­ty peri­od, only with a flower child sheen to make things that bit more insufferable.

Jack (Poul­ter, the film’s only endear­ing ele­ment) is set for a trip to Asia with best friend Tom (Jamie Black­ley) before a pre-ordained path to lawyer life at uni­ver­si­ty. He’s not real­ly feel­ing the whole adult­hood thing (“Sort of hope it turns into more of a gap life, real­ly”), and that’s before he has a chance encounter with enig­mat­ic beau­ty, Eve­lyn (Alma Jodor­owsky), a free spir­it who intro­duces him to a hid­den side of west Lon­don. The hedo­nis­tic lifestyle Jack is drawn to also includes flam­boy­ant ladies’ man, Cas­sius (co-writer Pre­ston Thomp­son), a pair of flighty sis­ters prone to chang­ing their names (Delev­ingne and Gala Gor­don), and Evelyn’s untrust­wor­thy boyfriend, Milo (Sebas­t­ian De Souza, the oth­er co-writer).

Putting aside the rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al prob­lem of hav­ing POC char­ac­ters be lit­er­al set dress­ing (one of the film’s strange attempts at humour is a mute man on a sofa who’s so high he appears to be dead), not to men­tion a trans­pho­bic joke with­in the open­ing min­utes, the major prob­lem with Kids in Love is that it’s a film that feels thread­bare and tired before it’s even got through its first big par­ty scene.

The soft focus cin­e­matog­ra­phy is clear­ly designed to invoke dreami­ness but instead just empha­sis­es the lack of weight to any of its char­ac­ters, sto­ry beats and com­men­tary on the tran­si­tion to adult­hood. It lan­guish­es in cliché, with char­ac­ters that nev­er shut up but have noth­ing to actu­al­ly say.