Turtles All the Way Down Film Review (2024)

Turtles All the Way Down arrived on Max on May 2, 2024, carrying the weight of one of John Green’s most personal novels and, by most accounts, doing something rare with it. The film follows Aza Holmes, a teenager whose obsessive-compulsive disorder shapes every interaction, every relationship, and every attempt at ordinary teenage life. When the billionaire father of her childhood crush Davis goes missing, Aza and her best friend Daisy find themselves pulled into a mystery that keeps threatening to be derailed by the one thing Aza can never fully outrun: her own mind.

Green, the novel’s author and executive producer on the film, has been open about living with OCD for most of his life. The story is drawn directly from that experience, and it shows. Aza’s disorder manifests as a terror of contamination, specifically bacteria, that produces thought spirals she describes as endless and inescapable. She tends a callus on her finger compulsively, prodding it until it bleeds, changing its bandage in rituals that pass for control. At her worst moments, she drinks hand sanitizer. The film does not aestheticise any of this. It sits with it.

Director Hannah Marks, who has spoken about her own deep personal connection to the material and to the experience of intrusive thoughts, spent six years getting this film made. She first pitched herself for the project at 24, before it was picked up by New Line Cinema after Fox 2000 collapsed. Her approach to visualising Aza’s internal world, rendering thought spirals as cascading internal monologue layered over flashes of sound and image, convinced Green that the book’s most resistant quality could survive the screen. The screenplay, by Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker, the writers behind Love, Simon, keeps the novel’s structure and the spiral as its central formal device.

Isabela Merced, who previously appeared in the Green adaptation Let It Snow, plays Aza with a withdrawn precision that several critics flagged as among the strongest work of her career. Merced has since starred in Alien: Romulus and played Hawkgirl in last year’s Superman reboot, and this is where that run started. The Guardian described her performance as capable of passing amusement, anxiety, self-loathing, panic and relief like quicksand, her open face doing the heavy lifting across scenes that offer little dialogue to hide behind. Cree Cicchino plays Daisy, Aza’s best friend, and many reviewers, including those at Mashable and HuffPost, identified the Aza and Daisy relationship as the film’s real emotional engine. Felix Mallard plays Davis, Aza’s childhood crush and the story’s love interest. Judy Reyes plays Aza’s mother. J. Smith-Cameron appears as Professor Abbott, a character Marks pursued specifically, and Poorna Jagannathan plays Dr. Kira Singh, Aza’s therapist.

The film holds an 85% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics broadly praising the lack of resolving Aza’s illness neatly. The New York Times noted Marks’ springy, stylish direction. A clinical psychologist writing for Metacritic called the OCD depiction as accurate to patient experience as anything they had seen on screen. Where critical responses pulled back was on the mystery plot involving Davis’s father, which several reviews considered underserved by the film’s running time, and on Davis himself as a character, whose role some found thinner than the friendship at the film’s centre.

The film does not offer Aza a cure. It does not position love as the thing that fixes her. What it does is make the case that a full life and a serious mental illness can coexist, which is precisely the argument Green has been making about his own experience for years. That the film lands that argument as consistently as it does is due in large part to the people who put it together caring, genuinely and personally, about getting it right.

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