The Half of It (2020) Review – Love Is Not About Finding Your Other Half. It's About Becoming Whole.

 

Header illustration for the review essay of The Half of It (2020).

Illustration created for editorial review purposes.

💭 Short Personal Reflection

The Half of It (2020) opens with a question that has stayed with me ever since: what if we've been telling the wrong love story all along? The film begins with Plato's Symposium — the idea that humans were once whole, split apart by the gods, and have spent their lives searching for the missing half. It is a beautiful myth. But watching Ellie Chu move through her quiet, self-sufficient world, I found myself wondering whether the real story of love is not about finding someone to complete us, but about learning to recognize ourselves more fully. Living life, I have come to believe that the hardest thing is not loving another person — it is learning how to inhabit oneself. This film understands that, and it holds that understanding with extraordinary gentleness. As a Netflix coming-of-age film, The Half of It explores identity, self-love, and the quiet process of becoming whole.

🎥 Film Overview

Director	Alice Wu
Release	May 1, 2020 (Netflix)
Runtime	104 minutes
Cast	Leah Lewis (Ellie Chu), Daniel Diemer (Paul Munsky), Alexxis Lemire (Aster Flores), Collin Chou (Edwin Chu)

📖 Story Summary

In the American coming-of-age comedy-drama The Half of It (2020), written and directed by Alice Wu, we follow Ellie Chu — a quietly brilliant Chinese-American teenager living in the small, rain-soaked town of Squahamish with her widowed father, a train station operator. To earn money, Ellie ghost-writes essays for classmates. When Paul Munsky, a kind but inarticulate jock, asks her to write love letters to Aster Flores — the most admired girl in school — Ellie agrees. The problem, which she keeps to herself, is that she is also drawn to Aster — through literature, art, and questions no one else in Squahamish is asking.

What unfolds is less a love triangle and more a quiet meditation on identity and longing. Loosely inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac, the film refuses a tidy resolution — instead offering something rarer: three young people who each leave the story more honestly themselves than when they entered it.

🌸 Key Themes

The Myth of the Other Half

The film's central provocation arrives in its first minutes: Ellie narrates the myth from Plato's Symposium — love as a search for the person who will make us whole again. But none of the three characters find their other half. What they find is something more honest — a clearer sense of who they are and what kind of life they are willing to accept. The myth, the film quietly suggests, is a way of outsourcing the difficult work of becoming oneself. This is not a cynical reading of love. It is a more demanding one.

The Loneliness of Being Unseen

Ellie quotes Sartre and Wilde in a town where those names mean nothing. She has learned to be self-sufficient in a way that looks, from the outside, like coldness — and has mistaken that withdrawal for independence. The letters she writes to Aster become her first real attempt at emotional honesty, addressed to someone else. The film understands a particular kind of loneliness: not from being disliked, but from being unseen. And the path out is not another person — it is the willingness to be seen, even at the risk of not being accepted.

Love as a Process of Self-Discovery

By the film's end, no one has found their other half. Ellie leaves on a train. Paul cooks with new purpose. Aster moves quietly toward a life of her own choosing. These resolutions are modest, not triumphant — and that modesty is exactly right. What each character gains is not a partner but a fuller understanding of themselves. Love, the film insists, is not the end of the search for self. It is one of the most demanding arenas in which that search takes place.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Alice Wu's Unhurried, Literary Vision

Few filmmakers working in the coming-of-age genre today bring as much literary intelligence to their work as Alice Wu. Known for her 2004 debut Saving Face, Wu returned sixteen years later with The Half of It — and the patience of that interval shows. She films Squahamish as genuinely grey and rain-soaked, lets scenes breathe, and trusts dialogue that weaves in Sartre, Wilde, and Plato to do its work without underlining. The result feels less like a Netflix teen comedy and more like an indie art film that happens to be set in high school: melancholic, restrained, and genuinely interested in its characters' inner lives.

Leah Lewis and the Warmth of Daniel Diemer

The film's greatest achievement is Leah Lewis's performance as Ellie — watchful, careful, and slightly too perceptive for her own comfort. Lewis makes Ellie's interiority visible without making it theatrical, communicating a full inner life through the smallest physical choices. It is a disciplined, quietly extraordinary performance.

Daniel Diemer as Paul is the film's unexpected warmth. He could have been a stock character, but Diemer gives Paul a sweetness that makes him fully human. His friendship with Ellie is the film's most surprising gift: genuine, funny, and genuinely moving by the end.

🌍 Where to Watch

Streaming: Netflix (worldwide)

Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. Please check current listings in your area.

📝 Final Thoughts

Beneath its coming-of-age comedy surface, The Half of It quietly asks a deeper question: what if the love story we've always been told is only half the story — and the other half is about learning to love ourselves?

The Half of It is a rare film: one that takes its teenage characters seriously as philosophical beings, gives them genuine interior lives, and trusts the audience to follow them somewhere quieter and more honest than the genre usually goes. More than five years after its release, The Half of It remains a tender, intelligent, and quietly radical film about love, identity, and the courage it takes to begin the long romance with oneself.

⭐ Who Will Appreciate This Film

For those who have ever felt slightly out of place in their own life — too thoughtful, too quiet, too aware of their own difference to explain it easily to others. Perfect for a solitary evening when you want a film that meets you where you are, asks good questions, and doesn't pretend the answers are simple. Recommended for viewers who loved Lady Bird (2017) or The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) — films where young people are reaching toward self-understanding with everything they have, and where that reaching is treated as the most important thing in the world. And if The Half of It's particular brand of literary loneliness resonated, The World of Us (2016) will find you again.

💭 Personal Note

I first came to The Half of It during a period when I was spending a great deal of time trying to be what others needed me to be. Reading the room. Fulfilling expectations. Being useful. It is a particular kind of exhaustion — not the exhaustion of doing too much, but of being too little of yourself for too long. Ellie Chu understood this without my having to explain it. She had learned to be invisible in exactly the way I had: by being competent, by being reliable, by writing the words other people needed without ever quite finding the ones she needed herself.

What the film gave me is the idea that love is not a rescue operation. No one arrives to complete us. But in the act of loving something honestly — a person, a place, a version of ourselves we haven't quite become yet — we learn who we are. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. The Half of It believes this completely. And so, I am slowly learning to believe it too.

사랑은 나를 완성해줄 누군가를 찾는 것이 아니라, 스스로 온전해지는 여정일지도 모른다.

(A reflection in Korean — because some truths about learning to love oneself feel truer in the language of the heart.)

💬 Join the Conversation

Have you ever felt the particular loneliness of being slightly out of step with the world around you — and what helped you find your way back to yourself? And do you think love is primarily about connection with another person, or is it also, at its core, a process of self-discovery? What does becoming whole mean to you?

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If The Half of It's meditation on identity, longing, and the quiet work of self-understanding resonated with you, these films offer their own gentle sanctuaries:

• Lady Bird (2017) – A young woman tries to become herself in a town she is desperate to leave
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) – A teenager learns that being loved begins with being seen — including by yourself
• The World of Us (2016) – A Korean coming-of-age film about friendship, exclusion, and the cost of hiding who you are
• Lucky Chan-sil (2019) – A woman in her forties begins, quietly and bravely, to start over from herself
• Before Sunrise (1995) – Two strangers talk through a night in Vienna and discover that love might just be two people paying very close attention

May you find, as Ellie does, the courage to leave — and the even greater courage to begin.

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee writes at Cinematic Sanctuaries, exploring stories where the quiet work of becoming oneself — with all its loneliness and unexpected grace — is treated as the most human journey of all.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.