Beyond the Universe

Nina ( Giulia Be ) has no shortage of dreams: she wants to be a great concert pianist and is working towards being accepted into a renowned conservatory. But her body threatens to interfere. Due to her lupus disease, her kidneys are no longer really playing along, and she urgently needs a new one. Until then, she has no choice but to take it easy and use dialysis to bridge the time. During her treatment, she meets the young doctor Gabriel ( Henry Zaga ). Soon there is a spark between the two, even if this is not advisable in their situation. Not only that doctors should not do anything with patients. Because of the illness, they also don’t know whether they have a future together…

For a while, they were a big trend: love dramas about young people in which at least one of the two characters has a serious illness. One can be divided about the raison d’être of such sometimes very manipulative films. Playing with suffering was certainly profitable. Titles like Fate is a lousy traitor or Three Steps to You made a lot of money at the box office. Of course, Netflix is ​​also aware of this. With Not My League, a complete trilogy about the love of a young woman suffering from cystic fibrosis was published there. Now there is Beyond the Universe for the target group looking for a combination of tragedy and romance.

In contrast to the Italian in-house colleague, who also occasionally incorporated bizarre humor, this is almost consistently serious. Only Yuri ( Leo Bahia) is supposed to provide amusement as a fat best gay friend. The fact that nothing more than the cliché of the queer drama queen jumps out is not exactly funny. The other characters are terrible too. The fact that an aspiring doctor would want to force wine on someone who says they’re allergic to it isn’t even a joke. The fact that he throws Yuri out of his own apartment in order to have her to himself and Nina doesn’t exactly make him a popular figure and stands in quite a stark contrast to the attempt to describe him as selfless. Things are looking a little better for Nina, apart from a later derailment, when the drama suddenly breaks through again with the obligatory escalation.

“Beyond the Universe” adheres to the recipe for success of telling about the new love of an attractive couple who are overshadowed by a serious illness. The characters are horrible, the manipulations bold, and the film is also far too long. That’s nice to look at then. The cheap drama has nothing to do with real feelings.

• Beyond the Universe