If it’s this hard to get through the trailers for next month’s If I Stay without curling up into a little ball and crying myself to sleep, I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like at the critics’ screening. Perhaps I’ll relive my childhood days of running a lemonade stand and set up a booth selling Kleenex outside the theater – unless AMC already has that covered, which it very well might. Regardless, if the trailers are any indication, this YA adaptation is going to be one big sobfest.
The latest trailer, set to the rousing sounds of A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera’s Say Something, doesn’t hold back when it comes to exploring the impossible choice faced by teenager Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz) in If I Stay. After a terrible car accident kills both her parents and younger brother, Mia is left in a coma, dangling precariously between life and death. Though life holds the promise of true love with her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley) and likely success as a cellist, the idea of waking up to a world without her family may be too terrible for her to bear – and Mia’s fate is in her hands. She must decide for herself whether she should come back to the land of the living and confront an existence more lonely than she ever imagined – or slip away into the great unknown.
Last fall’s Carrie was a bit of a misfire, so it’s about time that the tremendously talented Moretz found a film to propel her to stardom. If I Stay‘s tear-jerking premise seems set to do just that – and the terrific supporting cast, including Mireille Enos and Stacy Keach, should help to keep this a highly dramatic venture, rather than a borderline exploitative one.
If I Stay opens August 22nd.
