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It is hard to get it right when mixing historical settings with contemporary culture on screen. Shrek ran with it successfully for a couple of films but then it started to get laboured and those movies that have tried it in live action, films like Ella Enchanted and Camila Cabello’s Cinderella, never quite found the balance from the outset. These things jar, that’s the point but the problem is, you know, they jar. The movie that have done this best, things like Stardust and The Princess Bride, know to keep the modern sensibilities but avoid the heavy anachronisms, the colloquialisms and the pop songs.

Rosaline manages to walk the line nicely though, even with all of the above included. It helps that it loses the fairytale structure that has been a part of all of these previous efforts, deciding instead to lay the conventions of a teen comedy over Romeo and Juliet. (It is wise enough to follow Cinderella and Ella Enchanted in casting Minnie Driver though – smart decision.)

I think it works because Romeo and Juliet is already built around teen angst and a sense of the universality of this is carried with the transition. It certainly hasn’t done any harm that Baz Luhrmann so tightly knitted this text to modern times back in ‘96. He may have done it the other way around; taking the old language and putting it against a twentieth century backdrop, but even a decade and a half later his film remains the touchstone for young people coming to this story.

This also has a simple confidence that seemed lacking from other projects, it kind of says ‘this is what we are doing, go with it’ and as a result you do. Rosaline herself, as fans of Shakespeare will know, is an usually unseen character in the original play. She has turned up in a few adaptations but mostly she is just a plot device. She is the woman Romeo sneaks into the Capulet party to see, where he then bumps into Juliet. This film, and the book it is adapted from, is not the first to draw her to the foreground. On stage she is already a key character in Juliet in Mantua and Sharman MacDonald’s After Juliet where MacDonald’s daughter Keira Knightly originated the part. She is also in the musical & Juliet. This is definitely the first time she has been the title character over her more famous cousin though.

Rather than tell a totally different story to the one we know, the plot here intertwines with the established narrative as it did with Shakespeare’s own Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Lion King 3. This being the case the famous players are all here, albeit with a 2022 twist. One time Dora the Explorer, Isabella Merced is a compelling Juliet and The Map of Tiny Perfect Things’ Kyle Allen is her not too bright but charming and preternaturally good at on the spot poetry Romeo. They both fit in this rich high school kid’s cosplay version of Verona nicely. (Imagine if Westworld opened a Tudor park.) In this set up Paris is the gay best friend, which is a trope I thought we’d got past but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that putting old genre conventions in this even older period is the point.

Of course following the play also means that certain events are locked in. This is interesting because with this you know that that sooner or later people are going to start dying and it is intriguing to see how they are going to work this in with the breezy tone. In this respect while you kind of know where everything is going, you also don’t (even if by the end maybe you did).

After everything though, the most important factor in the success of film is appropriately its leading lady, and the actor who plays her. Kaitlin Dever may suffer from the Matthew Broderick curse where that one film early in the career will never be eclipsed but a lot of her Booksmart energy is channeled into this and she has created a hugely compelling protagonist out of a character who originally sat right at the other end of the roll call. Dever is having her Anna Kendrick moment right now but hopefully with hard hitting projects like TV’s Unbelievable also in her filmography she won’t get sidelined with all the chirpy parts and can find something in a varied career to supersede her Ferris Bueller.

By the very end Rosalind does take a turn for the conventional but it earns a lot of favour getting there and with the whole idea behind it, this film was always going to build on good will (pun intended).

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The Ripley Factor:

Taking a head strong and savvy young woman who is full of modern ideas and placing her in the middle of a famously patriarchal time was also going to give them a few easy feminist shots to take. It is fair to say that they go for all of them they can but it’s still fun to see them land.

Rosaline is the same over confident but flawed heroine, who while pushing boundaries and taking others to school, learns lessons about herself, from a hundred other teen romcoms. This though, as Alicia Silverstone will tell you, also has its basis in the British literary canon.

Rosaline is on Disney+ now