REVIEW: In ‘Heartstopper Forever,’ Love Is A Choice

Heartstopper has grown in emotion and resonance since it first debuted on Netflix in 2023. Based on Alice Oseman‘s Webtoon, the writer and artist has served as the Netflix Original series showrunner as well. Capturing young love and the coming-of-age tumult that comes with it, Heartstopper has been a window into queer joy and a hopeful message of growth for those looking to fit in. Now, Heartstopper Forever brings the series to a close. 

Written by Oseman, the film is directed by Wash Westmoreland and wraps up Nick Nelson (Kit Connor) and Charlie Spring’s (Joe Locke) journey through high school as they approach adulthood and the choice of what to do with their futures. After Heartstopper Season 3, the couple is inseparable, both physically and mentally. They rely on each other at every turn, and their joy has become centered around their romance. 

Now having taken the steps toward intimacy, the physical closeness has deepened their love and their bond. But with Nick preparing to leave for university and Charlie finding new independence at school, the reality of a long-distance relationship begins to weigh on them.

How can someone be your everything while you’re five hours apart? But more importantly, what do you do when the person you love doesn’t need you to thrive? As the couple grapples with these questions, doubts take hold, and their relationship faces its biggest challenge yet. Change.

After three seasons, Netflix’s Heartstopper comes to an emotional end.

Heartstopper Forever is a portrait of young love at the moment when it becomes real. Where adulthood blossoms, fights grow bigger, worries carry more weight, and decisions become more load-bearing. While some have called for the Netflix Original series to remain the perfect, joyous representations of queer young adulthood, the series and this film have chosen reality over paper dreams. 

Who we are when we enter a relationship is not who we are as we stay in it or when we leave. Grappling with that reality in real time can be too much for anyone trying to turn their high school sweetheart into a lifetime love affair. Heartstopper Forever doesn’t try to do anything but lay emotion bare for the audience to see.

Life, love, and every relationship we have are messy. In some ways, I’ve come to believe that if they aren’t messy, they aren’t real. There are fights, regrets, and moments of selfishness that exist to make the happiness that much sweeter when you finally capture it. There is never a question as to if Charlie and Nick love each other. There isn’t even a question of whether the on-again-off-again then on-again couple of Elle Argent (Yasmin Finney) and Tao Xu (William Gao) love each other. 

The greatness of Alice Oseman’s story is that change is unyielding, and people grow. 

Heartstopper Forever instead chooses to investigate a turning point in life when you have to decide what you want. Not because it’s easy, but because despite the way that fear and anxiety will cripple you in the moment, you have to do it. Nothing here is about falling out of love, but rather about deciding how you need to be loved and learning whether you have it in you to love someone back. 

I gave up the idea of soulmates when I entered college. The idea that some predestined person was out there waiting for me to cross their path, or for mine to cross theirs, lost its romance the more I found myself struggling to pay for school, taking 20 hours of classes, and generally just realizing that people are mostly pit stops in your life.

But deciding that love was a choice was a level of maturity that has given me the best 12 years of my life; it gave me my husband. And every day we wake up and choose each other. After every fight, we still choose the smiles we give each other when we aren’t being too stubborn to listen. 

That doesn’t mean that insecurities don’t bubble up. I’m more like Nick than I want to admit. I love with my entire being, and I try to make one person my everything—or at the very least everything that I want to see. Growing in your love means learning how to show up to the person you love, and what they need. Learning how to build a life for myself within the life we have together, with my own wants, needs, friends, and hobbies, has been vital to understanding who I am and to my marriage. 

Heartstopper forever captures one universal truth about love: it’s messy. 

The growing pains of life are emotional turning points, but ultimately they all mount into teaching us that we are in charge of our own happiness and future. Whether it’s Charlie deciding to be the person he needed when he was being bullied, or Nick deciding that he doesn’t have to live like everyone is his father lest he repeat his mistakes, much of Heartstopper Forever’s successes come from the turning points in its young characters’ lives. They’re all moments that you can’t really walk back from, but you can grow into. 

In most of their relationship that we’ve seen throughout the series three seasons, Nick’s strength is the focus, with only a few moments of vulnerability. And for his part, Charlie is the one who needs protecting. However, over the course of their romance, we’ve seen things start to shift as Charlie becomes more sure in his identity as a gay man and Nick begins to wonder if he’s being left behind as his boyfriend becomes more independent. 

The crux of their conflict is that Charlie is learning that he doesn’t want to be the one who is always cared for, and Nick is learning that one person can not be your everything. Lest you crush them under the weight of your expectations. Co-dependence and independence have been slowly shaping the boys’ lives, and here, as they get ready to graduate and head to university, it reaches a point of no return. 

Intimacy is its own language in Heartstopper Forever. 

Heartstopper Forever is all about change and understanding just how important it is to communicate. In a way, this final film is a culmination of everything that the story has been moving towards. The ensemble cast is there, but no more than to be a relationship foil to our leads and help them through their problems. This is all about Charlie and Nick, and the young actors in those roles play this duo perfectly. 

The importance of the portrayal is that Joe Locke and Kit Connor need to capture youth and love in all of the ways that it appears. Anger, jealousy, hope, wonder, and of course ample amounts of vulnerability. While this is captured through their dialogue, it’s their moments of intimacy that carry far more emotions than just what we hear them say. 

Intimacy for them morphs from something exciting into something desperate, an act of trying to hold onto each other. It’s a way to show and receive love, but also to bat away the sadness and worries of the world outside their bedroom. Nick’s bad dreams speak to his long-held worries that he won’t be enough to save Charlie from his demons. But Charlie’s mental health can’t be tied to one person and one relationship. How they couple untease their lives is just as important as how they come together. 

Love is about who you choose to be, as much as who you choose to be with. 

They want a life together, a future protected by the four walls of their own place. While sex is an act that most people chide in queer romances as being exploitative, here, it’s heartfelt. Intimacy and love aren’t the same thing for every person who experiences it, and that is true from the opening scenes of Heartstopper Forever to its closing. 

Heartstopper has been one of the most beautiful and universal stories of growing up and of romance that has been put to television. And while much of that is thanks to Alice Oseman’s original Webtoon, the rest of it is thanks to the actors who have brought our adolescent fears to life and have captured the turning point that many of us can point to and remember in our lives. 

When did you realize that your agency in love was what made it beautiful? When did you learn that to love someone else, you first have to understand how you wanted to be loved? Or have you not realized those universal truths in life, just yet? Heartstopper Forever isn’t just one of the best representations of queer romance on television; it’s one of the healthiest looks at the messiness of life put to screen. 

Heartstopper Forever is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix. 

Season 1 | Season 2 | Season 3