An iPhone love affair that runs out of juice

PRETTy soon into Everything, Everything, it becomes clear that it is actually a great deal of nothing. Just because a film has been adapted from a novel for ‘young adults’ doesn’t mean it needs to be so adolescently plotted and written.

At least there’s not much wrong with the acting. Amandla Stenberg does a decent job as 18-year-old Maddy, who (despite looking the absolute picture of health) has suffered from Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) all her life.

She must live indoors in a germ-free environment or else she will surely die.

But then a dish called Olly (nick Robinson, also fine) waves at her from his skateboard, and, behind her airtight bedroom window, she swoons. Their burgeoning love is enabled partly by his proximity (usefully, he lives next door) but mostly by Apple.

If there wasn’t already a film called Steve Jobs, this might have been it. For without their iPhones and iMacs, our latter-day Romeo and Juliet (the Shakespearian allusions aren’t very subtle) would never have found themselves trapped in what appears to be a doomed mutual passion.

Actually, egregious product placement aside, it’s not a bad premise for a romantic drama, and 2014’s The Fault In Our Stars showed that such films can be genuine tear-jerkers.

Unfortunately, director Stella Meghie makes it 50 per cent too soppy.

Moreover, having been a teenager myself and parented three of them, I can testify that the way Maddy and her overprotective mother spend most of the movie simpering lovingly at each other bears almost no relation to the real world.

It’s not just Maddy who exists in a bubble, but also the film.