CHENNAI: The latest Netflix drop, “The In Between,” will remind one of the hauntingly sorrowful 1990 “Ghost” with Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg and the late Patrick Swayze. Arie Posin’s summertime romance is based on a screenplay by Marc Klein of the same name, and much like “Ghost,” fits the title of a plot that hovers between life and death, though defying a definite slotting. It is a paranormal adventure about a boy who like the Swayze character, Sam Wheat, refuses to go away after death, choosing to stay, albeit in an invisible form, in this world.
In the first few minutes of the film, we see a horrific road accident in which Skylar (Kyle Allen) dies, while girlfriend Tessa escapes with a ruptured heart.
Through flashbacks, we learn that Tessa met her future boyfriend at the cinema, when he sat down beside her and began translating a French language film.
For someone who has kept the world at bay with her camera acting as an impregnable barrier, Skylar disarms her. He is unbelievably polite and courteous, speaks three languages, has read Wharton and Austen, and is a champion rower. To top it all he is a lifeguard, and Tessa falls hopelessly in love with him.
The director resorts to a split timeline to push us out of the past into not quite the present but the in between, revealing how the girl begins to imagine his presence.
Tessa, who is an adopted child of very loving parents and who has always been an introvert preferring to watch the world from a distance through her camera viewfinder, is confused and confounded when strange things begin to happen. When her photographs begin to disappear after they are developed, she is sure that Skylar is around.
Though made with teen audiences in focus, the film occasionally forays into adult content and shows fireworks when the young lovers kiss for the first time. King, best known for “The Kissing Booth” trilogy, and Allen, who was one of the Jets in “West Side Story,” make a cute couple; their chemistry is as magical as their love story. In this day and age, it is well-nigh impossible to come across a romance as tender as “The In Between.”
The end, though, is somewhat skewed. It seems too sugary and moves away from the David Foster Wallace epigraph at the beginning: “Every love story is a ghost story.”
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