Sometimes a romance feels so inevitable that whatever does, the universe just keeps pushing them back together. Hollywood romance Are often built on a formula of “guy get girl, guy loses girl, guy gets girl back”, but the love stories that shape us usually require that bike often go through that bike a lot of times, without guarantees for happy ending.
The five -year romance between Charlie (Nick Robinson) and Harper (Emilia Jones) is nothing if not cyclic. It started out as a high school -fine, with the two artistic error adjustments that burn CDs of their favorite songs and leave them in each other’s cabinets, content to let their favorite artists talk at an age when the prospects of spending time with people you like often feel like social suicide. They connect to a college party, which has originally forgotten forgetting until a well-placed song on the Aux cord makes it clear that their memories about each other were crystal clear.
The sparks a romance that sees them move to New Orleans together when Harper pursues his culinary dreams, just to discover that his lack of ambition and struggles with abuse are obstacles that their relationship is not strong enough to deal with. Year goes by, and they each build their own separate life until another spontaneous party meets makes it clear that some feelings are more difficult to forget than your favorite song.
It may sound like a spoiler -loaded summary of a whole movie, but “Charlie Harper“Author Tom Dean (who together with Mac Eldridge) uses cyclic story that gives you all that information very early. film Switch between the three “first” meetings between the convicted couple, who are completely unable to suppress their mutual attraction – at least the first three meetings, as there is every reason to believe that it will happen again after the film ends – to cut between the three legs in their relationship to illustrate that no number of developing external circumstances can change the fact that we love.
The chemistry between the two young lovers is undeniable, but the wedges that eventually drive them apart are present from the beginning. He is a crucial project “I can fix him”, handsome and self -destructive with pain behind his beautiful eyes and a taste for poetry and literature even though he lived in a trailer park with a history of depression and abuse in his family. She is an ambitious planner with dreams of being one of the best chefs in the world, with work ethics to do so. They are drawn to each other because they both see that there is more in the world than the sad little town they grew up in (and let’s realize it, because they are both hot), but her obsession with rising over her station would always collide with his seemingly satisfaction to drink to an early grave.
Dean and Eldridge know how to make a stylish movie that manipulative tow all the pretty emotional strings, and some tears will probably be dropped at the premiere “Charlie Harper”. It is not difficult to imagine that the film finds an audience among younger indie films who either do not remember films such as “(500) Days of Summer” or are simply anxious to have one for their own generation. Those with a little more viewing experience under their belts will probably be bored of the film’s dependence on clichés, as it often feels like a bitter -sweet mixture of old indie tropes: the manipulative power of nostalgia, the ways that seemingly unpleasant parts of physical media can be forming memories, the euphorical feeling of real and you are yet another home team and the real one and you are another secret and you can be forming, the real one and you are yet another secret and the real and your secret, which is yet another secret and you can be as much as you can become forming, and that is that you are also of the big world, which is yet another secret and you can be formed and you can be formed, which Secret and you can become shaping, and that is to get rid of the big world, which is yet another home. Love was not enough, relationships can still shape us into the better.
Some films get richer the more time you sit with them, but “Charlie Harper” is the type of movie whose impact will always be the strongest when you go out of the theater. The lack of originality and occasional dialogue on the nose interrupts most of its rewatch value, but it is difficult not to be affected in the moment by the sincerity of its story and chemistry between Robinson and Jones. Many films have been made about the toxic young romance that shape us into the more stable adults that we eventually become, but the world will stop getting them when they stop making us feel things. And “Charlie Harper” is proof that day has not come yet.
Rating: B-
“Charlie Harper” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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