As a recovering teenage girl, I’m not one to besmirch (non-Twilight) movies made for young women. I saw She’s All That in theatres, OK, I get it. Which is why when I saw the trailer for Every Day, a body-swapping drama, I was intrigued. However, there’s one unexplained detail that leaves me kind of horrified.
Every Day, based on the bestselling novel from David Levithan, is about the relationship between teenage girl Rhiannon and “A”, a benevolent spirit who wakes up in a different person’s body every day. The bodies vary by race and gender identity – the main consistency is age (so it doesn’t get creepy) and physical proximity (the bodies have to be near each other). Rhiannon and A get to know each other and fall in love, struggling to make a relationship work, since A can never stay in the same person twice. There’s also the difficulty of A having to navigate the lives of all these different teenagers, which leads me to that aforementioned detail:
What happens to these kids when they’re possessed by a spirit?
I assume – or at least I hope – this gets explained in the book, but in the trailer there is no mention of what happens to these kids every time their bodies are taken over. Are they possessed? Do they think they’re asleep? Do they go to temporary Heaven? Also, what are the consequences are of a spirit taking over their body for a day? For example, the inhabited body might be in a relationship, meaning that partner would think their loved one was cheating with Rhiannon. Or maybe the person being inhabited isn’t attracted to women, and by kissing Rhiannon, A is making them do something they would normally not do.
Then you have the life disruption. There’s a moment in the trailer where A is running away from their latest body’s parents, since they’re leaving for Hawaii and A doesn’t want to wake up in a body thousands of kilometers away. That’s understandable, but what about the host body? Maybe he’s been waiting for this trip his entire life. Perhaps he won some major award and the ceremony is in Maui. Hell, maybe he’s dying and this is the last journey he’s ever going to take. The trailer focuses on the relationship – which is understandable, it is a teen romance. But I’m morbidly curious about the hellscape A leaves in their wake.
Every Day comes out February 18 in the US. An Australian release date has not yet been confirmed.