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Spontaneous Movie Review

Spontaneous is a 2020 romantic teen black comedy film directed by Brian Duffield in his directorial debut and starring Katherine Langford. It’s such an original flick.

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“I’m gonna be amazing in spite of all life’s shit“

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When students in their high school inexplicably start to explode, seniors Mara and Dylan struggle to survive in a world where each moment may be their last. Although this premise sounds silly and the combustions are definitely ridiculous at times, the movie ended up being immensely moving despite all odds. These explosions may stand as a metaphor for school shootings or teenage suicide, but the film itself isn’t really interested in solving its central mystery.

While that was a bit problematic and way too ambiguous for its own sake, it still led to that amazing finale that was honestly incredibly inspirational. It’s the most brutal and literal version of living your life to the fullest as if it’s your last day, but it fits the teenage experience and the results are quite inspired.

I adored the main romance of the movie. Mara and Dylan are just such a wonderful couple and all of their scenes are an utter delight. Surprisingly, this is one of the most romantic films that I have seen in quite a while. Everything with this couple just works and their dynamic is infectious and so much fun.

The humor is great in the film, very sophisticated at times and genuinely hilarious in certain moments. Still however, the tone is all over the place and it’s the biggest issue the movie faced from the onset and unfortunately never resolved. I get that the spontaneous combustions weren’t meant to be scary in the first place, but that final scene with so many deaths was intense and simply the positioning of all these scenes as both funny and also scary and tragic was odd and it did not really work.

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What did work in Spontaneous is the acting. Charlie Plummer is great as the sweet Dylan while Katherine Langford is absolutely terrific and so confident as very likable, fun Mara. This girl should prove to be a role mother for teenage girls as she’s both cool and very endearing. The other characters are less memorable. The movie is also well shot and scored while the direction from this debuting director is surprisingly strong. The ending was not only inspirational, but also quite tragic.

Audacious in its immensely original premise and actually quite profound in its inspirational ending, Spontaneous is just a different beast altogether in the realm of coming-of-age flicks. Although its tone is expectedly all over the place, the humor is mostly strong, the central performance from Katherine Langford is terrific and the film is both touching and surprisingly exceedingly romantic. It’s the type of wildly authentic movie that should be given to those people who are skeptics with regards to the existence of originality in today’s films.

My Rating – 4