Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Evan Hansen, a high schooler with social anxiety, unintentionally gets caught up in a lie after the family of a classmate who committed suicide mistakes one of Hansen’s letters for their son’s suicide note.
Dear Evan Hansen is a stage-to-screen adaptation that largely fails to translate its source material effectively. The plot's central premise — a teenager perpetuating a lie about a dead classmate for social gain — becomes increasingly difficult to sympathize with on film, where the emotional manipulation feels more glaring than on stage. Ben Platt, reprising his Broadway role but visibly too old for the part, delivers committed vocals but struggles to make Evan likable or believable as a teenager, and the surrounding cast is underutilized. Cinematography is flat and televisual, doing little to cinematic the theatrical source. The musical's core concept remains somewhat distinctive in its exploration of social media, grief exploitation, and mental health, earning modest novelty points, but the execution is derivative of better teen dramedies. The ending attempts catharsis but feels unearned given the moral weight of Evan's deception, leaving the audience with resolution that the story hasn't justified.