This film features important contributions from Felicia Maxime and Edvin Ryding, two stars of the wildly popular Netflix drama Young Royals. I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room and the reason I took at least 2 stars off my rating. In Young Royals, the actors themselves performed the overdubs in English, at least that's what Ryding said in an interview. I don't know the reason for this, maybe it's union rules or something, but for A Part Of You the overdubbing was recorded in Los Angeles with a completely new set of actors.
I'm an auditory and visual learner, and I find that my enjoyment of TV and movies is enhanced by having the subtitles on and, when the OST is not in English, the dubbed version as well. Then I watched APOY and the dubbing in places was painfully obvious. There were scenes where lips were moving and voices didn't fit. And when the body movements of the actors on screen don't match the voices in my headphones, you only get half the performance. It's a real shame: Young Royals showed that both Felicia and Edvin have the ability to deliver stellar performances in English and Swedish.
Director: Sigge EklundWriter: Michaela HamiltonStars: Felicia Maxime, Edvin Ryding, Zara Larsson
But hey, what we get from the actors on screen is something great and really emotionally powerful. It didn't make me cry, like the Young Royals did; God, that made me howl. Plot-wise, this reminds me of another Swedish drama, Tore, also on Netflix. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but Netflix really needs to work on how they label their film genres. It seems like any movie involving teenagers is a coming-of-age drama. So without spoilers, this movie focuses on the death of a close family member and how the surviving family and friends deal with it. It's not a coming of age, perhaps a more appropriate label might simply be "grieving."
So I took it off 2 stars because in English it would benefit from a performance by the original cast. The third star is a precautionary deduction. Parents, I wouldn't want my 15 year old son to watch this unsupervised. Although in some of the content categories you could say mild to none, for example there is very little sex/nudity, the level of alcohol/substance abuse among teens is frightening.
I feel like it could either encourage kids to want to go to these types of parties or scare them half silly. I think I would fall into the latter group. The film is about the death of a family member, from the point of view of the younger sister. I think a 15 year old watching this would need adult support and might find the topic itself quite disturbing. Once again, the 15th certificate is Netflix wanting to bag viewers who saw these actors in Young Royals; actually an 18 certificate is more suitable.
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