Everything, Everything gets mental illness wrong

18-year-old Maddy desperately wants to float in the ocean and find Hawaii’s state fish, the humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa, but she can never go outside.

As a baby, she is diagnosed with SCID, an immunodeficiency disorder, also known as the “bubble boy disease,” which confines her to the walls of her house.

As Maddy puts it, “My immune system sucks.”

It isn’t until Maddy falls for the cute and charming boy Olly who moves in next door that she decides risking everything is worth it to fall in love.

Everything, Everything is sick-lit meets coming-of-age teen romance in Stella Meghie’s adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s widely popular young adult novel of the same name. It’s filled to the brim with classic YA tropes: the boy next door, a strong female protagonist, unrequited love, and broken family units. The main leads, Amandla Stenberg and Nick Robinson, prove they’ve got the acting chops to hold their own, but for all of the pair’s charm and candor, it’s simply not enough to make up for the film’s, otherwise, serious lack in plot development.

Maddy and Olly’s burgeoning romance is at the forefront of the movie, with the smaller subplots of Olly’s abusive father and Maddy’s overprotective mother (Anika Noni Rose) interwoven into the story. It’s just too bad we don’t actually get to see these supporting plot points go anywhere substantial.

This is especially apparent with Maddy’s mother, Pauline, who also happens to be her at home caregiver and doctor. She’s a helicopter parent with little to focus on but her daughter’s life-threatening illness. In the first half act we’re sympathetic to the strict hold she has on Maddy’s life. Her motivations are dictated by the love she has for her only daughter, unabashedly protecting her from harm’s way. In an honest and tender moment between a mother and daughter, she speaks to Maddy candidly about her relationship with Olly, but the benevolent scene is soon upended by the sequence of events that follow in the second-half of the movie.

We learn the truth about Maddy’s illness — and it’s not pretty.

Immediately, Pauline’s character arc shifts, and we are left to believe she is the villain of this story. But is that entirely fair? The film’s adaptation fails to bring a much larger issue to light: the complexities of mental illness.

There is no outright diagnosis for Pauline, other than some sort of breakdown after her husband and son die in a car accident shortly after Maddy is born. This point is subtly brought up in a voice-over while a montage shows Maddy floating in the water, which is a more than convenient way to tie everything up into a neat bow. In a chance to openly discuss mental illness and the vice grip fear places on someone’s behavior and way of thinking, Everything, Everything chooses to shy away from the opportunity. Instead, the audience is steered into a different direction: Pauline selfishly robbed Maddy of eighteen years of her life.

Or maybe we’re meant to focus on Maddy’s glossy outfits instead — distracting us from the bigger issues at play.