Another day, another dying teen. Hollywood loves to kill off teenagers. Movies are the #1 leading cause of 30 year olds playing 15 year olds dying prematurely.
In Midnight Sun, Katie has xeroderma pigmentosum, or XP, a rare genetic condition that means the sun is literally poisonous to her and could kill her in seconds. As you can imagine, she’s led a sheltered 17 years, sleeping by day, hanging out with her protective dad by night. But give a girl an ounce of outside contact, and she comes home with a boy, from whom she keeps her illness a secret.
This movie takes its cues from last year’s dying teen girl movie, Everything 
Everything, in which the girl is also confined to her house, but she wasn’t allergic to the sun, she was allergic to everything. Possibly including the sun. And she didn’t have a dead mother, she had a dead father. And she didn’t fall in love with the boy next door. Oh wait, she did. So yeah, beautiful teen girls with terminal diseases just waiting to die up in their castles until a boy comes along who’s handsome enough to make her risk it all. So she can die on her front lawn instead.
Why do teen girls want so badly to watch themselves die? I wonder if movies made to be watched while you’re on your period is a genre: movies that invite tears and ice cream binge-ing while making young women feel seen. But high school romance doesn’t need to have life or death stakes, and your first boyfriend shouldn’t be your last. I’m about 15 minutes past 17, which is way too old to sympathize with what’s going on here. Featuring Bella Thorne, star of all the straight-to-Netflix runners up, and Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold and Maria Shriver, with all the genetic talent you’d assume.
It’s astonishing, really, that a movie can work this hard at being this bad. Midnight Sun puts the jerk in tearjerker.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 
I just saw this pop up on Netflix. Probably a pass from me.
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Big time.
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But good for a laugh at least! (The review, not dying teens).
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Amazing that she’s allergic to the sun and the town doesn’t come after her with torches for being a vampire…..
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You are the funniest, most readable film critic I have ever read. Hope you don’t mind me saying that!
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Mind? My goodness, I should pay you dividends!
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I think the question needs to be, why do producers/directors want to make movies of dying teenage girls.
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Wasn’t the first of this genre “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble”? I guess it worked so well that they had to get girls into the act! It reminds me of Disney–are there any movies where the mother isn’t dead/dying/killed/threatened with death?!
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It must be a cousin to the dystopian fiction. Teens really like to see themselves in life or death stakes, it seems.
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Love this review! Definitely made me laugh.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news though, but unfortunately I don’t think this whole teens dying in films trend is going anywhere anytime soon. Five Feet Apart comes out in March. Spoiler alert: the book sucked.
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Ah jeez!
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