Ben Oliver

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film

Love, Simon

Being gay is your thing. There are parts of it you have to go through alone.
19 March 2018

A gay teenager struggling to work out how to come out of the closet finds someone from his school anonymously online who is in the same situation. They write to each other and fall in love over the internet.

This is a smart and sweet coming of age drama sure to be a crowd pleaser. It owes a lot to John Hughes but is original enough to be worth a watch. Berlanti captures a good dose of the adolescent angst I’m sure most people have been through at some point.

When you boil it down it’s about a kid with a lovely supportive family and lovely supportive friends, living out in some white picket suburb in the states. It’s set in a semi-fantasy world - somewhere almost too generic to truly exist - and that’s a feeling that doesn’t quite go away as the credits roll.

That said there’s no shortage of gently amusing high school teenage dramas but Love, Simon definitely sits among the better ones.

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