Review: Heartstopper Forever | Season 4

“I love knowing that we have tomorrow.”

It’s easy for me to be cynical about Netflix’s decision to conclude Heartstopper with a feature film. It’s long been clear that the company has no actual investment in 90% of its original series, caring more about their collective impact on subscriber rates and viewership than their individual contributions. When they dragged their feet after the debut of the third season, the message was clear: if Heartstopper had once been a (pride) flag bearer for Netflix’s interest in telling queer stories, it was now just another library title that was underperforming its initial debut. Giving it a feature film was better than the alternative of cancellation, but in the abstract it was also a way for Netflix to avoid bad optics and still reduce costs as though a full season would be a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things.

That said, I’m not surprised there’s very little cynical about Heartstopper Forever in practice, given that this is one of television’s most earnest series. Additionally, while it’s hard to imagine most TV shows comfortably reducing its narrative focus, Heartstopper has a clear benefit in source material that does the job for them by centering the leads without the same interest in the rest of the cast. Heartstopper Forever adapts the sixth volume of Alice Oseman’s comic (almost) directly, telling the story of Nick Nelson’s last year of Sixth Form and the beginning of the rest of his life and the future of his relationship with Charlie Spring.

I started my journey with Heartstopper Forever by watching the movie itself on Friday afternoon, and afterwards I read my copy of Volume 6 that I’d picked up at the mall the day before. It was an order that made the most sense to me, and one that gave me a different appreciation for Oseman’s choices here. On the one hand, my first reaction to the movie was mostly affirmed: reverting to the tight narrative focus of the comic creates an effective ending for Nick and Charlie, but it feels inherently unsatisfying as a conclusion to a TV show that consciously expanded its focus on the supporting characters and had no space to give them a similar ending. However, I was simultaneously struck by what adaptation choices she did make within that adaptation, small concessions to separating the two even as they merge back together in the end.