A Part of You 2024 Movie Review
This film contains major contributions from Felicia Maxime and Edvin Ryding – two stars of the hugely popular Young Royals Netflix Drama. I’m going to talk about the elephant in the room and the reason why I deducted at least 2 stars from my rating. In Young Royals, the actors themselves performed the English overdubs, 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 find my enjoyment of TV/Movies enhanced by having subtitles switched on, and when the OST is not English, the dubbed version also. So I watched APOY and the dubbing in places was painfully obvious. There were scenes where the lips moving and the voices did not mesh. And when the body movements of the actors on the screen don’t match the voices out of my headphones you only get half a performance. It’s a real shame – Young Royals proved that both Felicia and Edvin have got it in them to give stellar performances in English and Swedish.
But hey, what we do get from the actors on screen is great, really emotionally powerful stuff. It didn’t make me cry, the way Young Royals did – God, that had me HOWLING. Plotwise, this reminds me of yet another Swedish drama, Tore, also on Netflix. I don’t want to give a lot of the plot away, but Netflix really need to work on how they label their film genres. It seems that any film involving teenagers is a “coming-of-age” drama. So, without spoilers, this film centres on the death of a close family member, and how the surviving family and friends get to grips with it. It’s not a coming of age , maybe a more appropriate label might just be “grief”.
So I deducted 2 stars because in English it would benefit from a performance from the original cast. The third star is a cautionary deduction. Parents, I would not want my 15 year old kid watching this unsupervised. Although in some of the content categories you could say mild to none, eg there’s very little sex/nudity, the level of teen alcohol/substance abuse is frightening. I feel it could either encourage kids to want to go to these kinds of parties, or scare them half silly. I think I’d fall into the latter group. The film is about a family member’s death, from the point of view of the younger sister. I think a 15 year old watching this would need adult support and its very subject matter could be quite upsetting for them. Once again, the 15 certificate is Netflix wanting to bag the viewers who watched these actors in Young Royals – really an 18 certificate is more suitable.
