Review: Dear Evan Hansen is the most horrific film of the year

Not since Cats have we seen an online pile-up as vicious as the reception to Dear Evan Hansen, the theatrical adaptation of the smash Broadway play that premiered at TIFF last week. The film stars Ben Platt (reviving his role from the Broadway show) as Evan Hansen, a shy and awkward teenager (more on that later) trying to fit in with his often cruel classmates.

To help cope with his crippling insecurities, Hansen’s therapist asks Evan to write a series of letters to himself. One of those letters then falls into the hands of a fellow student named Connor (Colton Ryan ) who tragically takes his own life. Connor’s parents (played by Amy Adams and Danny Pino ) discover the letter, assuming it’s their son’s suicide note addressed to Evan. Thinking that Evan was secretly best friends with the troubled Connor, they invite Evan into their lives and treat him as their own son. Evan begrudgingly goes along with the ploy at first (in part to be near Connor’s younger sister Zoe, played by Kaitlyn Dever), but is soon carried away by his newfound popularity as the bereaved best friend and emotional health icon. He then somehow entrenches the lies about his “friendship” with Connor even further, in frankly shocking ways that make any sense of true redemption almost impossible. Yes, all of this is the basis for a musical.

That rather long summary doesn’t even touch on some of the more outlandish and truly revolting plot turns in the film. While the internet had a good collective laugh about the fact that Ben Platt looks more like a tenured professor than a shy teenager, the truly unnerving thing about Dear Evan Hansen is the cavalier way it treats mental health and teen suicide. To make matters worse, Platt’s advanced looks make all of his character’s decisions feel way creepier and despicable. Perhaps an actual teen’s performance would make some of the more outlandish plot devices make some sort of sense, but watching a grown man try to make moves on a grieving teen after lying about her brother’s death has to be one of the most disturbing moments in any film this year (and we cover a lot of horror on this site).

Maybe this read differently on a stage, where the production racked in a staggering half dozen Tony Awards. But it’s impossible to shake the overwhelming feeling of dread and despair when you realize just how dark this story truly is. Set against that darkness is a handful of chirpy musical numbers that feel completely tonally detached from everything else happening on-screen, creating a whiplash effect that never coalesces into anything meaningful.

If there is any levity at all to this mess, it’s watching Ben Platt (who gives a fine and earnest performance overall) trying to look and carry himself like a meek teenager. The direction seems to have been for him to just slouch constantly like he’s auditioning for a role as Igor in a new Frankenstein reboot. It looks laughably silly, and if anything, makes him look more like an adult trying to pass as a teen, which adds a whole other level of creepiness to what is already an incredibly unlikeable character.

It’s hard to even pinpoint just where things went wrong with Dear Evan Hansen. Adapting an award-winning Broadway musical to the screen has worked in the past, and director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) has a proven track record of delivering a moving film centered on teenage emotions. Yet as it stands, Dear Evan Hansen is a failure on every level, a film that plays dangerously loose with highly fraught elements while focusing on one of the most despicable on-screen “protagonists” we’ve seen in years. There isn’t even the campy joy to watching this like with Cats ; it’s simply a long, drawn-out slog that leaves you feeling dirty for swimming in its filthy waters for so long.

Dear Evan Hansen is in theaters now.