Movie Review: 'Every Day'

Every Day is a clumsy and dimwitted young adult fantasy romance that tries to use modern gender politics to assume relevance. A clever premise aside, Every Day pretty much stops at its clever conceit and assumed relevance without any thought or nuance given to what the ideas being presented really mean. If Every Day were any more competent, it would be truly offensive.

Every Day stars Angourie Rice as Rhiannon, an average teenage girl who has an above average day with her usually below average boyfriend, Justin (Justice Smith). Until this day, Justin has been neglectful, forgetful, and just generally jerky. But on this day, Justin is sweet, understanding and spontaneous. Weirdly, the next day, Justin goes back to his neglectful ways with seemingly no explanation.

What we know that Rhiannon doesn’t is that it wasn’t really Justin who treated her to this best day ever. Rather, it was a being named simply A. A is a being who wakes up in a different body every single day and has been doing so since before A can remember. Gender doesn’t matter, A wakes up as both boys and girls and even transgender teens. The bodies are always the same age as A and are generally within a particular proximity.

Usually, A takes measures to avoid making an impact in the lives of the bodies it controls. But something changed when A met Rhiannon. Something about Rhiannon made A want to know more about her, to spend more time with her, and to get involved with her life. Naturally, this isn’t a simple notion. A must convince Rhiannon that A exists in these different bodies while Rhiannon must contend with being attracted to a personality that inhabits all sorts of different bodies.

As I mentioned, the premise of Every Day is clever. There is a great deal to be explored in this idea. Sadly, a young adult fantasy romance is not the place to expect big ideas to be well explored. Every Day, directed by Michael Sucsy, in his third feature following The Vow and Grey Gardens, takes a good premise and then runs away from the various implications of that premise.

It is a lovely and naïve notion that physical beauty, physical attractiveness, doesn’t matter. Every Day avoids this particularly troublesome aspect of its premise by only placing A in the body of people who Rhiannon would find attractive, once she decides that A is for real and not some elaborate prank. The film takes up only one somewhat challenging moment, when A comes to Rhiannon as a girl.

At this point the two have been growing more intimate and when A asks for a kiss, there is a kiss. Is this a challenge to Rhiannon’s sense of self? Does this cause conflict for her? Confusion? Not really, in fact, this never comes up again in the movie. Indeed, the whole of the rest of the film revolves on keeping A in the body of handsome boy and staying far away from any potentially challenging ideas about gender and sexuality.

Every Day wants to assume the relevance of a story that implies LGTBQ themes, including putting A in the body of a transgender teen, early enough in the story to avoid complicating the romance, but not have to deal with any of the complexity of those themes. Heaven forbid the movie make audiences in any way uncomfortable by delving into the gender politics implied by this premise.

Every Day is insidious for the way the premise is played as a relevant and timely when it’s really gutless and calculated. All of that said, the acting isn’t terrible, especially young Angourie Rice who deserves better than what this movie gives her. Rice is a compelling and lovely young girl who does her best to give some dramatic weight to the movie. Sadly, she’s just a pawn in the hands of a machine made movie intent on pretending relevance for marketing purposes.