Watching Nick and Charlie’s high school romance over three seasons of “Heartstopper” raised an unanswerable question for many queer adults: What if we had seen stories about same-sex love and could have fallen in love that way, that young? Would animated sparks have danced around us, too? That’s why so much of the Netflix show, based on Alice Oseman’s young adult graphic novels, has felt like a reparative fantasy. It lets queer adults live a youth many of us never got to have. The glossy series graduates into adulthood in the “Heartstopper Forever” film.
Their romance no longer defined by the secrecy of stolen kisses in the school storage closet, the movie gives the couple room to grow together and apart. As Charlie continues to struggle with anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Nick hits a low one drunken night, setting off a painful fallout between them. With college looming, they face a grown-up reality: The happy ending will inevitably arrive if two people can learn how to survive change.
“Hanky-panky,” as Charlie’s dad once called it, is now simply sex. As Charlie, not the shyest person in his graduating class anymore, confidently reaches into Nick’s pants on a pier, I was hit with a flash of other culturally defining films: “Brokeback Mountain,” where tortured longing leads to tragedy; “Philadelphia,” where queer love is shadowed by the AIDS crisis; and “Love, Simon,” where intimacy is remarkably chaste. Nick and Charlie’s experience is a hard-won moment of unapologetic same-sex desire.
The film builds on the series’ radical promise: care without end. Care for your boyfriend. Care for your trans friend who needs you right now. Care for ourselves while caring for someone else. But the idea of what loving someone means has grown up. Nick and Charlie are still so in love they could be the mascots for it, except “Heartstopper Forever” understands companionship isn’t a cure-all. With a script by Oseman that is less idyllic than the series, the director Wash Westmoreland likewise guides their maturation with a gentle hand: Once-bright colors deepen, the series’ signature slide transitions feel more sophisticated. Kit Connor brings profound emotional weight to Nick’s anxious devotion, while Joe Locke imbues Charlie with a quiet resilience. Together, they create a bond so convincing that it survives even the script and score’s occasional habit of overexplaining what their faces already reveal. As their friend Tao (William Gao) puts it: “You can communicate just by looking at each other, I can see it.”
There was one scene that I thought the movie might overdo. It involves an older gay couple who share a long romantic history, and Charlie, after his worst fight with Nick yet, encounters them at the coffeehouse where he works. I was prepared for a sweeping speech. Instead, Charlie simply overhears them: decades of devotion, decades of care. And then Charlie’s love for Nick flashes across his face.
“Heartstopper Forever” ultimately answers the question many generations of queer people couldn’t in Alfie (Caleb Evers), a new bullied student at Truham Grammar School. In him, we see a younger Charlie who now has someone a few steps ahead to remind him that he’s going to be OK.
Heartstopper Forever Not rated. 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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