‘Before I Fall’ Can’t Break Free From Its Built-in YA Shackles

Zoey Deutch has been primed and ready for superstardom since her breakout role in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!!. Her sensitive eyes and impressive range are on full display in Before I Fall, a YA novel adaptation directed by Ry Russo-Young that mashes up Groundhog Day and Mean Girls to middling effect. This wholly inoffensive but particularly stale self-help parable is more cinematically inspired than other teen movies of its ilk and isn’t likely to slow Deutch’s steady career growth, but it doesn’t do her any favors, either. Dirty Grandpa was atrocious, but at least she got to share the screen with Robert De Niro; Before I Fall, however, affords her no such bragging rights with its Twilight Zone take on teen drama.

Still, Deutch is a consummate pro and adds layers of depth and despair to a story that’s at times so blunt and heavy-handed that it hurts. She plays Samantha Kingston, a wealthy, popular high school senior who’s happiest when squealing her pretty head off with her three best friends, each more self-involved and snobby than the last. After an otherwise typical day of teenaging (wake up late, ignore family, gossip with friends at school, get drunk at house party), the girls’ car is sideswiped on their way home. Samantha then finds herself in an impossible loop, reliving the last 24 hours of her life over, and over, and over again. Teary-eyed, angsty soul-searching ensues, with Samantha evaluating and reevaluating her life’s various relationships and rivalries on the way to becoming the truest version of herself.

With each rotation arises a different life lesson, as when Samantha finally realizes that she’s dating the biggest douchebag in school and starts to fall for her nerdy, kind-hearted secret admirer (Logan Miller). She goes through stages of anger, depression, enlightenment, and even finds herself going through a day-long goth phase, literally walking a mile in the shoes of a girl she’s bullied for years (the symbolism is as eye-rolling as it sounds). The greatest lesson of all revolves around the artsy outcast girl Samantha and her friends have been making fun of since they were kids, but it’s almost humorous that it takes several spins around her metaphysical hamster wheel to come to the realization that treating people like garbage makes them feel like garbage.

The journey is corny and morally obvious, and yet rings true on certain levels thanks to Deutch’s interpretation of the role. The first time we meet Samantha, she’s just a hair less stereotypical than her friends, their ditzy posse looking like four bobbleheads jiggling around in a shoebox as they cruise around their Seattle suburb, blasting trashy pop songs, cackling away about pretty boys, sexcapades, and the tragically average girls they pick on every day at school. The role at first seems too one-dimensional for the capable young actress, but as the time loops begin to jostle Samantha’s emotional stability, layer after layer of her personality gets peeled back, and it’s then that Deutch finds her depth. She’s got a warm, charming screen presence that only grows more endearing as the story wears on and, on several occasions, saves the film from mediocrity.

Deutch’s co-stars aren’t as well served by the script. Elody and Ally (Medalion Rahimi and Cynthia Wu) both anxiously cling to their social status in their own way (one’s shy, the other is loud), but their virtues are greatly outweighed by their respective bitchy-ness. The bitchiest of the irritatingly self-described “bitches” is Lindsay (Halston Sage), the Rachel McAdams to Deutch’s Lindsay Lohan. There’s an attempt later in the film to find a shred of virtue amid her unstoppable rampage of bullying and condescension (gasp–her parents got divorced!), but ultimately, the b-word is an appropriate epithet.

Russo-Young often gets bogged down by the inherent YA trappings of the source material (written by Lauren Oliver), though she creates a palpable sense of atmospheric dread by milking the gloomy Pacific Northwest setting for everything it’s worth. The Shining-inspired aerial shots of the forested roadways and majestic hillside homes that frame the story are a welcome cinematic touch that helps distract from the film’s shortcomings. The clique-horror high school drama may be rote, but the director’s style is clear enough in vision that it seeps into the movie’s every nook and cranny and blankets Samantha’s temporal spirit walk in a haunting melancholy. Even better, Russo-Young isn’t afraid to let her camera linger on Deutch’s wonderfully expressive face during Samantha’s lowest lows, and it’s in these tender moments that the movie breaks free of its crippling clichés.