For better and for worse, John Green’s young adult worlds tend toward the dramatic and expansive – big swings, big emotions, big mysteries and dreams. And always, the specter of death – of parents, friends (Looking for Alaska, a manic pixie dream girl mystery turned Hulu series) or the protagonists themselves (the cancer romance turned tearjerker hit The Fault in Our Stars). Turtles All the Way Down, the writer’s 2017 novel, turns the drama more inward: its protagonist, a high-schooler named Aza Holmes, struggles with derailing thought spirals from obsessive compulsive disorder, partially inspired by the author’s own experience.
Such an alienating internal experience is the type of characterization that could be difficult to translate to screen, both for relatability and for the action – what to do with a romance when one half is too deathly afraid of bacteria to kiss? That the director Hannah Marks’s winsome film adaptation for Max invites us into Aza’s head from the jump, cued by jarring clicks and flashes of wriggly microscope slides, is a feat. Credit, too, to Isabela Merced, convincingly playing a midwestern teenage girl riven in two: the part who goes to Applebee’s and wants a boyfriend and dreams of attending Northwestern for lectures by her favorite psychology professor (Succession’s J Smith Cameron), and the part who constantly fears contracting a lethal infection of C diff bacteria.
