REVIEW: ‘Dear David’ Nails Its Ending

Dear David is an Indonesian Netflix Original YA movie by director Lucky Kuswandi. Laras (Shenina Cinnamon) has a secret online fiction account where she writes romance stories about her crush David (Emir Mahira). When she accidentally forgets to log out of her account on a school computer, somebody leaks the stories to everyone in school. But even with all of his unwanted, newfound attention, David still can’t get his own crush and Laras’ former friend Dilla (Caitlin North Lewis) to pay him any attention.

The movie starts off with a gorgeously costumed and constructed fantasy scene. It happens a couple of times throughout the movie, and honestly, not enough times. These scenes are completely outside the realm of the main characters’ privileged Jakarta lives, and for most of them, help really set the movie off on a distinguishing note. It does perhaps give the impression that there’s going to be more of these kinds of scenes than there wind up being since the best ones are frontloaded. And it does make jumping into the mundane real world a bit of a bummer. But the rest of the movie has lots of ups and downs and ends on a real high.

These highs and lows are most extreme in relation to the central dramatic conflict, Laras’ stories, their leaking, Dilla getting blamed, and David becoming massively embarrassed. The lows here are mostly derived from the fact that for the vast majority of the movie, not a single person stops to think something is wrong. There are parents going around reading the stories. Teachers are senselessly blaming kids with no evidence. It’s sometimes aggravating to watch all of these people just blatantly violating David like this.

But then there are moments sprinkled throughout where Dear David shows that it’s aware of how messed up the situation is and that it’s actually trying to be a commentary on the awful pedagogy and hypocrisy of the puritanical society. It’s actually quite effective in this by the end, with a very strong final scene making it all quite explicit. I just wish that it would have been a bit more explicit throughout because having such a violating situation tangled up with romance makes it easy to forget that teenagers are being exploited here.

The central romantic conflict is a classic YA love triangle. There are plenty of eye-rolly moments with overly grand gestures, and the way that David’s being an athletic soccer player makes up the majority of his personality, at least, in the eyes of his countless doters. But on the whole, once the romantic pieces start falling into place, it somehow works, despite the circumstances that brought it all together. There are solid queer elements, never feeling exploitative despite the plot literally being about exploitation. The conflict between the three main characters is a bit too generous in how quickly feelings turn among them, but it also always feels grounded in real conflicts teens in this situation would be struggling through. Their poor decision-making and lack of communication start out irritating, but by the end, it feels like it’s made up for in spades through some genuine reconciliation and comeuppance.

Dear David really does nail its ending. By the end, not only do the threads of the romantic pieces feel tied up, but all of the social commentaries that could have been overlooked by an audience who wasn’t looking for it comes around to clearly announce itself. It’s not a guarantee in YA that all of the character elements, like David’s anxiety and the messages about societies’ shortcomings, will get neat bows on them, so it feels great that it happens here.

Dear David delivers on both its romantic and dramatic plot threads. The journey to get there isn’t always as good as its ending, but some great fantasy scenes and enough of a good connection between the leads make it worth the watch.

Dear David is streaming now on Netflix.

Jason Flatt

Jason is the Sr. Editor at But Why Tho? and producer of the But Why Tho? Podcast. He’s usually writing about foreign films, Jewish media, and summer camp.