Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Turtles All the Way Down’ on Max, Where Isabela Merced Elevates a John Green YA Adaptation

Let’s list the notable names involved with Turtles All the Way Down (now streaming on Max), shall we? It’s based on a novel by John Green, best known for penning megaselling YA weeper The Fault in Our Stars. It stars Isabela Merced, best known for being the live-action Dora the Explorer, fresh off a role in (checks notes) (coughs) Madame Web, and soon to star in the hotly anticipated Alien: Romulus. And it’s directed by Hannah Marks, who previously helmed the dram-com Don’t Make Me Go, which, like her current endeavor, is an overstuffed dram-com that functions thanks to some endearing performances. But does Turtles function better? Let’s find out. 

TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Right off the bat, we get to know how Aza’s (Merced) mind works: In voiceover, she gives quite the spiel about how the human body consists of 50% microbes. We’re all just “glorified bacterial colonies,” she says. No surprise: Cut to Aza in therapy, where we learn she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, manifesting in serious germophobia. She has a band-aid on her finger covering a callus she routinely picks open and sanitizes and wraps up. She barely keeps a lid on her existential neurosis that has concluded that she is not a creature of free will, considering her corpus is home to an invisible microbiome that she believes physically owns her. She doesn’t like to take her medication, fearing that it eats away at who she is. On top of that, her father died a handful of years ago, and he was the only person who truly understood her; her mother (Judy Reyes), bless her, does her best. Please sympathize with Mom here. In fact, I think both of them deserve hugs and loving words of support.

Other than all this, Aza does is a fairly typical teenager. She’s inseparable from her heavily accessorized bestie Daisy (Cree Cicchino), who’s outgoing and bubbly and more than a little bit zany, the yin to Aza’s withdrawn yang. (Does Daisy’s job entail wearing a giant furry costume to entertain children? Of course it does!) Their favorite thing to do is eat cheap lunch with a coupon at (popular nationwide restaurant chain known for its high salt content and overwhelming mediocrity), where Aza can sip a (popular name-brand soda beverage) and eat a plain-ass veggie burger. One day at the restaurant they spot a news report about a local billionaire who disappeared in the wake of a major financial scandal; authorities are offering $100k for any information about him. Wait, didn’t Aza know the billionaire’s son? You know, Davis Pickett Jr. (Felix Mallard)? Indeed. They were pals at a support group for grieving youngsters. A light bulb goes off above Daisy’s head: What if they find Davis and plumb him for information and then score the $100k so they can afford college and crap? But of course. IT’S THE PERFECT CRIME.

And so they try to do that, and end up in the living room of Davis’ massive mansion, staring at Dreamy Davis. I mean would you just look at his eyebrows. You’ll lose yourself in them if you’re not careful, and you’ll need a machete to escape. Problem is, Aza’s mental illness has her saying things like, “Swapping bodily fluids is my idea of hell,” which makes dating a bit treacherous. But she tries. Meanwhile, there’s about a dozen more plot threads going on here: Aza wants to go to Northwestern, where the philosophy prof she idolizes is a teacher, but her mom isn’t sure if she can be out in the world on her own with her condition, creating tension. Davis catches a whiff of Aza and Daisy’s plan to earn the $100k. Daisy gets hot and heavy with their school buddy Mychal (Maliq Johnson). The everlasting specter of Dead Parent Drama. Daisy’s wayyyyy into writing Star Wars fanfic. And if two blatant, repetitive and crass incidents of product placement weren’t enough, we see the logos of (sugary toaster pastry brand) and (highly addictive snack chips) placed prominently in the frame. Seriously, it’s a little hard to be invested in Aza’s various and precariously stacked romanto-comedio-dramatic plights when you feel like you’re walking down the aisles at the grocery store. Just be thankful we like Isabela Merced so much.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Funny, my viewing of Turtles All the Way Down fell between watching microbiome documentary The Secrets of Your Gut and Jerry Seinfeld’s brand-biocom about (sugary toaster pastry brand), Unfrosted – as if fate itself dictates my schedule. 

Performance Worth Watching: Merced has eyes so expressive they can be sad and hopeful at the same time. She’s a heartbreaker who tends to elevate the movies she’s in; hopefully, better-written projects loom in her future. 

Memorable Dialogue: YA stuff tends to cover pretty broad tonal ground, exemplified by the following dialogue bits:

Daisy tempers Aza’s anxieties about sharing her condition with Davis: “You could literally start peeing out of your ears and he’d still be into you.”

Aza and Davis peer up at the stars and muse about how the light takes 12 years to travel through space so they can see it: “In the light they see, we have the best and worst in front of us,” Davis says perfectly, because he always says The Perfect Thing.

Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond a frank discussion of dick pics. 

Our Take: Turtles All the Way Down tends to – wait, what’s with that title? Well, it’s taken from a quasi-profound allegory that the Northwestern prof shares with Aza, and it encompasses everything from the entirety of existence to individual personhood. It’s The Thing That Aza Needs To Hear, and frankly, the movie would function just fine without it. There are a lot of bells and whistles here that seem unnecessary, as if Green and screenwriters Elizabeth Bergrer and Isaac Aptaker were worried that a stripped-down story about a teenage girl with OCD who’s trying to overcome her fear of germs so she can mash lips with another sentient pot of bacteria stew just wasn’t enough. Where they should lean into that core irony, they instead needlessly embellish it with enough plotplotplot to fill a miniseries, and it gets especially bananers in the third act, when Marks tries to juggle about 10 balls but only keeps about one-and-a-half of them in the air. 

And I’m here to insist that yes, indeed, that core story is plenty. And the filmmakers do that part extraordinarily well, which, alongside a thoughtful Merced performance that the screenplay might not deserve, keeps Turtles afloat. Aza’s “thought spirals” – inspired by Green’s struggles with OCD – routinely push her into troublesome bouts of illogic; her high-school day-to-day is frequently interrupted by visions of squirming single-celled organisms and disorienting whooshing sounds, and the effect is memorably dramatic. Aza subscribes to the stigma that she can’t truly be herself when she takes medication, a meaningful character flourish that’ll ring true for many in the audience. (A thought: Can’t the opposite be true? That she can’t truly be herself without the medication to correct a chemical imbalance?)

Without the deep empathy of this portrayal of mental illness, the film would be a grating collection of heavily calculated idiosyncracies hoping to dredge up bits of comedy or drama. Daisy is a stereotypical BFF character overplayed by Cicchino, whose performance feels more Nick/Disney sitcom than serious feature film. The $100k-reward not-quite-subplot is begging to hit the cutting-room floor. The overbaked pseudo-profundities in the dialogue and themes feel like literary concoctions rather than legit human behavior. There’s no room for any examination of grief and loss (a worn-out theme in modern cinema) among all the other bric-a-brac. The score is pushy and intrusive. The dynamic between Aza and her mother could use more emphasis, although Merced and Reyes find some dramatic traction where they can. Let’s be grateful that Merced elbows much of the excessive stuff out of the way – except the paid brands; as ever, THE BRANDS consume all in their path – and finds the heart of the character and her internal dilemma, keeping us locked in when the Everything Elseness of the movie tempts us to check out.

Our Call: Merced’s excellence lifts Turtles all the way up to mediocre-plus. STREAM IT for the lack of fault in its star.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.