Prime Video Review – Anything’s Possible (2022)

Cast your mind back to when you were at school, when all you wanted to do was  fit in, to run with the most popular kids and most definitely not stand out from the crowd in any way, no matter how small. It never went away, and in Billy Porter’s directorial debut, Anything’s Possible, Kelsa (Eva Reign) faces all those dilemmas and more in her final year at high school.

Pulled in two directions – wanting to be accepted and blend in with the crowd, but also be true to her trans self – Kelsa’s gone through a lot of the difficult stuff already. The medication and going to a school where everybody had known her as a boy are all behind her, so now she wants to be an ordinary girl, despite her online videos which go into great detail about her experiences. She’s also fighting shy of important aspects of high school life, most significant of which is falling in love, but it finds her whether she likes it or not, and his name is Kahl (Abubakr Ali). He’s shy, so how does he approach her, knowing that his conservative family and his closest friend are unlikely to approve?

It’s a film full of questions, a lot of searching for the answers and with its heart loud and proud on its sleeve. And that obvious sincerity makes it easy to warm to what is essentially a teen romance with a contemporary and thought-provoking angle. But the fact that this is Porter’s debut as a director, working with a first feature script from Alvaro Garcia Lecuona, is all too apparent. What should be engaging conversations about the film’s issues sound more akin to Kelsa’s videos – monologues, with an almost preachy tone. Heartfelt they may be, but they’re not dialogue, and their heaviness and artificiality are at odds with the approach this most contemporary of coming of age films is aiming for.

The teenage rom-com this was designed to be almost disappears under the weight of its messages. It should have a twinkle in its eye and a giggle on its lips, but there’s less of that than there should be. And the result is surprisingly wholesome, close to sanitised and very safe, with little that’s edgy or challenging. It does benefit from Reign’s endearing performance, which is the film’s third debut. Even if she appears perhaps over-confident, it’s a quality that she uses to move the film along and she’s hardly ever off the screen. There’s a sense that Anything’s Possible is a starting point, with another film waiting to be made on the same subject but with its feet anchored in reality rather than the soft focus, comforting world of romance.

★★★

Drama | Cert: 12A | Prime Video from 22 July | Dir. Billy Porter | Eva Reign, Abubakr Ali, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Simone Joy Jones, Courtnee Carter