Critic-at-large: Heartstopper Forever, Daughter From Hell

Heartstopper’s film finale is so shaky it risks toppling the show that preceded it

In Heartstopper Forever, the feature-length film that closes out the eponymous TV series, things have changed. Once-bullied gay kid Charlie Spring is running for Head Boy, and, on the high of his emotional campaign speech, he clinches it. Now, it’s his gorgeous and popular jock boyfriend, Nick Nelson, who, nearing the end of his high school career, is staring down the barrel of loneliness and uncertainty. It’s a charming and believable enough switcheroo for the film to ride out its runtime on—not least for how it teases out Nick’s blokeish sadness, his insecurities and privacies, that the series has encircled since at least its second season—but the youthful exuberance that made its TV show so potent has all dried up. The film’s obligatory dark middle (in which our boys pretend to break up for about thirty minutes’ screentime) draws out strong performances from its leads, Joe Locke and Kit Connor, who are doing their very best to act as the teenagers that they, now four years into playing these roles, no longer look like. And, I mean, look... Charlie Spring, I too would fall into a major depressive episode if I saw my ex getting hit on at a perplexingly-timed daylight pride parade nightclub afterparty at which I’m sober and sad and inexplicably wearing a hoodie on the dancefloor—but there are factors here that you can control, darling. The contrived narrative scenarios that populate Heartstopper Forever’s world are overwrought and unbelievable—yet in the perverted genius of their architect, the usually-brilliant novelist Alice Oseman, they’re in that sense quite like teenage romance itself. Still, by the time our boys get back together, all dressed up in black and white, the place she takes us is back to the location of their first kiss in a neglected ballroom. In this scene, it lands with a thud that the film’s narrative is not merely in service of its fans, it’s in service of its protagonists, Nick and Charlie. They’ve become fans of who they used to be: their friends tell them they’re perfect even when they aren’t feeling it, and their romance is fraught with obligation and mutual—but impossible—neediness. In fact, all they seem to be able to talk about is the status of their relationship, “communicating” so intently with each other that you can almost hear gears cranking. Not only does this result in a misjudged underuse of Hearstopper’s great ensemble cast, it’s also a deeply paranoid and deeply Gen Z conversational affect that’s as real as it is bleak, bleak, bleak. I remember phoning home daily to Mummy on the subject during my last relationship... and honestly, fellow kids, our only hope is that Olivia Rodrigo sees through it. If only Nick and Charlie spent less time analysing their relationship and actually living it might we not have been subjected to this flagrant, laggard, stodgy disappointment-of-a-film capping off an otherwise-seminal TV series. We’re back in the dusty old ballroom, only this time we’re the ghosts. 

Gracie Abrams: Daughter From Hell

Gracie Abrams does Gracie Abrams — Why is everyone so surprised?

Gracie Abrams has been trying to write from a place of stability. The heartbroken heartbreaker who wrote her smash hit “I Love You, I’m Sorry” back in 2024 is now in a loving relationship. But, in the grand tradition of Diotima in the Symposium and Taylor Swift in “Cornelia Street,” she’s discovered that even real and lasting love comes with its own anxieties, because we’re all mortal, afraid, dark even to ourselves, and surrounded by loss. “Hit the Wall” is this album’s finest and first track—a tight Aaron Dessner production grounded by a kick drum so muffled even Jack Antonoff would turn it up—that sees Abrams swing between needing and fearing: “And I once saw clearly, but it's bloodshot / And I want you so badly, but I close off.” She keeps telling us, in those first two choruses, that she’s “Hit the wall,” not “a problem you can solve”—but with the music in repetitive stasis, it’s hard to feel she really has. Then comes the bridge: with its major supertonic briefly weakening our sense of the home key, it cleverly enacts the very hitting of the wall that the song has been describing, we realise, the aftermath of. In the swirl of textural and harmonic subversion there, we feel suspended, flung up in the crash—and to fall to the ground for one last verse-chorus cycle is our only safety, because, as Abrams has it, “Sooner or later, you’ll find out / I live in a pattern of breakdowns.” This is an impressive, mature song about being the difficult partner in somebody else’s life—and it’s one of Abrams’ very best.

The newspaper critics need this album to be a disappointment for some reason, so they’ve cited the exit of her songwriter friend Audrey Hobart, since embarked on her own solo career, as evidence that Abrams’ lyrics have gone too abstract for their own good. Well, “Man Like You,” certainly, feels incomplete—even before she hits a Sabrina Carpenter-style run in the chorus, you get the sense that a songwriter like Carpenter would have filled out its vagaries with clearer anecdotes and funnier hypotheticals. But Abrams is genuinely a gifted enough singer to deliver rather blank phrases like “And I'm gonna tell you the truth, it almost all went dark / But I'm gonna carry the pain for my whole life” (“Break My Heart”) and have you believe them. Elsewhere, the lucid “Humming,” a meditation on growing up amid Californian wildfires, shows Abrams in a strong light. And “Good Reason” makes another strong case for her depth, whose 12/8 feel and classical syntax sonically echo the aforementioned “I Love You, I’m Sorry”—though its lyrics find Abrams unable to find the kind of melancholy she channeled in that earlier song, and hence melancholic all over again. Now that’s probably getting at what people find grating about her work: her propensity for a kind of melodrama that is largely “unearned”; her directness of address that can feel cut-throat one moment and false the next. For the haters, there’s plenty here that’ll come across as the musical equivalent of watching paint dry—the title track is an, um, “reheating Ethel Cain’s nachos” type of bore; “Minibar” sounds like something Taylor Swift would’ve left off even the bajillionth vinyl variant of Midnights—but we needn’t pretend that we expected anything different from an Abrams record. 

As a final aside, I’ll say that I have zero tolerance left for the smug “nepo baby allegations,” which Abrams has handled with about as much grace as is imaginable. The fact is that she wrote these songs and you didn’t, and as much as you and me too would benefit from just so happening to be the offspring of wealthy and well-connected parents like hers, not everybody can write songs, largely for the same reason that not everybody can become a scholar of early modern women's complaint poetry or operate heavy machinery or do a really good Marc Taddei impression. You can point to circumstances, privileges, opportunities, and predispositions, but you have to reenter into the beautiful fantasy of personality at some point, because otherwise you’ll find yourself talking less about Abrams’ music and more speculating grouchily about her person as the beer before you goes room temperature and your friends’ eyes start glazing over. Abrams has offered the former—her music—to us for judgement, and, as this new record’s patchiness might indicate, even the ones who can write songs still struggle with the form endlessly. On Daughter From Hell, that might just exactly be her point: “Do I look high-functioning? / Or is my façade crumbling?” (“Look at My Life”).