Mid­night Sun

Imag­ine a love sto­ry between two teenagers, a boy and a girl, who just don’t fit in. The boy, Char­lie, (Patrick Schwarzeneg­ger) has big dreams, a sum­mer job, and is much nicer than the oth­er jocks. The girl, Katie (Bel­la Thorne), is fun­ny, tal­ent­ed, unre­al­is­ti­cal­ly beau­ti­ful, and has a rare dis­ease. They fall in love. There’s a bit of music try­ing to make you cry. Sound famil­iar? Expand out these clichés until they’re close to burst­ing, and you’ll be left with some idea of the tooth­less, recy­cled melo­dra­ma of Scott Speer’s Mid­night Sun.

The foun­da­tions lie in the dra­mat­ic poten­tial of a real ill­ness called Xero­der­ma Pig­men­to­sum, con­tract­ed by 17-year-old Katie. She’s spends her life behind the tint­ed cur­tains of her bed­room because her con­di­tion means that even the faintest ray of sun­shine could kill her. So she waits, hides, and writes songs until night­fall. ​“This is good. This is what Tay­lor Swift does,” says Katie’s kooky (you can tell, because she wears a beanie indoors) best friend, Mor­gan (Quinn Shep­hard). Good thing too, because, like Tay­lor once was, Katie is des­per­ate­ly crush­ing on the boy next door.

This is Char­lie, and although his good looks match Thorne’s whole­some, relat­able (but still annoy­ing­ly per­fect) physique, he isn’t like the oth­er pop­u­lar boys. He lost his swim­ming schol­ar­ship because of a drunk­en mis­take, and wan­ders home ear­ly from par­ties through bore­dom. On one late-night stroll, he (some­how) hears Katie strum­ming and singing at the train sta­tion where she busks.

As the rela­tion­ship between Katie and Char­lie blos­soms, their staged, awk­ward meet-cutes give way to effu­sive mon­tages of pas­sion – as much as a skin­ny-dip in a 12A romance will allow. But as it racks up good times and bad moments, the film mere­ly ticks all the box­es which align it to the his­to­ry of teenage screen schmaltz – it nev­er man­ages to pro­vide any­thing new.

Katie’s rare ill­ness pro­vides an unlike­ly premise, though XP isn’t mythol­o­gised as a freak­ish super­pow­er (not even with a sly wink to Twi­light). It isn’t exact­ly depict­ed in a way which makes you feel like it exists in real­i­ty, either. The only onscreen proof is in some lip­stick that’s a few shades lighter, and a tremor that could almost be mis­tak­en for first love nerves. XP, at its most explic­it, is dis­played via heavy under-eye make­up, rather than by the skin lesions that actu­al­ly char­ac­terise the disease.

There are, how­ev­er, glim­mers of progress when it comes to the film’s emo­tion­al inten­tions. Katie texts Char­lie first, he admits his own embar­rass­ing mis­takes and Katie intro­duces her dad to online dat­ing. But noth­ing shines bright enough to eclipse the bland char­ac­ter stereo­typ­ing. From slow motion dra­mat­ic run­ning to gen­dered cloth­ing (blue for a dis­traught father, pink for a com­fort­ing nurse), it’s far eas­i­er to laugh at the silli­ness of it all than to be moved by its depth.

There is a tar­get audi­ence, but even the love-thirsty teenage stans might only be able to enjoy Mid­night Sun by snig­ger­ing at how it pales in com­par­i­son to the work of YA nov­el­ists Nicholas Sparks and John Green. It’s all com­plete­ly unbe­liev­able and unre­lat­able, but as a big slab of cheese, it’s worth a nibble.