Every Day (dir. Michael Sucsy)

With a high-concept premise that’s so easy to mock, Michael Sucsy's adaptation of David Leaviathan's best selling novel of the same should be commended on it's boldness in attempting to tread new ground for the genre. Many of it’s contemporaries (the majority of which seem to stem from Nicholas Sparks’ vast back catalogue) blindly follow a formulaic ritual that offers momentary interest and little to no pay off. But “Every Day” is different -although unlikely to ignite a movement within the young-adult romance genre -there’s plenty here to keep the teen audiences happy without leaving their adult counterparts snoozing in the aisles.

Taking it’s main plot directly from the best-selling source, our drama follows the tribulations of a spirit called A, which assumes the body of the same teenager for only one day before changing to a new person the next day. Seemingly costing from one body to another, things change when the free-wheeling spirit takes the form of Justin (Justice Smith) - a talented sports high-school student, and alters his romantic side with his girlfriend Rhiannon (Angourie Rice). Feeling a connection with our young heroine, our spirit attempts to continue their relationship with Rhiannon even as they become a new person every 24 hours.

You’d think that this complex plot device would run out of gas in the first few sequences, and the schmaltzy exposition that litters the first third of the drama could easily be the catalyst for a series of guffaws in your local multiplex. But at the center of plot complexities there’s an underlying message which resurrects the film from the realms of the forgettable teen drama: personality is more important than what’s on the surface, and it’s a hopeful mantra which the film follows through with moderate success.

Additionally, it’s gender and it’s sexual politics are inherently progressive, eschewing basic "whitewashing" and heterosexual love interests in favor of the much more diverse and interesting LGBT stories. The cast are solid - even if the film has relatively no star-power to speak off. Angourie Rice- who was so brilliant in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys a few years back - is a engaging screen presence and able to convincingly find depth in the role - additionally, she doesn’t buckle under the pressure even when the drama wanders into clichéd territory.

Of course there is room for improvement: humor is strangely absent, as our director opts for tonal aesthetic which exudes extreme portent instead of playing it for laughs. Far too many times also, Sucsy veers toward repeating the same narrative tropes, and if you don’t get tired of seeing our characters kissing from a low-angle shot in the oncoming sunset, you might want to revisit your Sparks collection instead. But this is all insignificant in the end as Sucsy’s drama has important messages surrounding acceptance in a time when there seems to be a grand inconsistencies. It’s unlikely to move mountains, but if there’s going to be young-adult romance in theaters, at least make it about something instead of perpetuating the myth that everybody is the same.

Rating 3/5.