Everything in Between ** (2022, Jordan Dulieu, Freyja Benjamin, Martin Crewes, Gigi Edgley) – Classic Movie Review 13,684

Nadi Sha’s 2022 Australian movie Everything in Between is a slow but slick and sweet Love Story-style romantic drama, well made and well written, though it is mostly the four amusing and charming main performances that sell it.

Co-writer/ director Nadi Sha’s 2022 Australian movie Everything in Between is a rather slow and artificial but slick, smart and sweet Love Story-style romantic drama, well made and well written, though it is mostly the four amusing and charming main performances that sell it.

Jordan Dulieu stars as alienated 18-year-old Jay Knight, seen early on standing on a cliff top contemplating ending his life. Later at the hospital he meets 28-year-old life-loving backpacking American hippy Liz (Freyja Benjamin), and they form an immediate deep bond, which takes both of them by surprise. Jay’s idiot rich parents (Martin Crewes, Gigi Edgley), also surprised, are completely out of their depth with the various turns of events but are surprisingly tolerant and well meaning if only they knew what to do.

[Spoiler alert] It looks like Liz is the cure for Jay’s death wish, but then suddenly Liz discovers in the hospital test results that she has been brought down by a rare and exotic illness known as coccidioidomycosis, and she’s at death’s door instead. A brain operation might save her, but she’s consulted the signs and knows she’s going to die. Jay goes completely off the rails.

Jordan Dulieu moons about doing a grand job of looking sickly tragic throughout. Freyja Benjamin goes from playing mother earth to looking like she acting in the final stages of Camille in a few pages of the script, so that’s a big task for any actress, but somehow she manages it, surprisingly appealingly. Martin Crewes and Gigi Edgley, on the other hand, manage to make their awful characters both funny and sympathetic.

It’s all very manipulative and unreal, of course, just a movie concoction, with not a breath of real life, but not a bad wallow, ultimately more tearful than uplifting. In the real world none of this could happen, these characters couldn’t exist. But it’s only a movie. And it entertains, though as a guilty pleasure, possibly, and it has a good heart. There is quite a lot of talk in Nadi Sha and Grant Osborn’s screenplay, hence the sometimes slow thing, but the talk’s quite quality controlled, and it’s all set against entrancing Aussie city and seaside backdrops and in inviting interiors, hence the looking good thing.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,684

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