Riverdale may have ended its fourth season early due to the coronavirus pandemic, but its star Lili Reinhart will still appear on our screens this summer. Reinhart’s Chemical Hearts is coming to Amazon on August 21, 2020, according to Deadline, and it sounds like exactly the right YA romance to end your summer on.
In addition to starring in Chemical Hearts, Reinhart executive produces the film, which is adapted from Krystal Sutherland’s 2016 novel Our Chemical Hearts. The movie centers on self-described teen romantic Henry Page (Austin Abrams) who, as of the start of his senior year of high school, has yet to fall in love. When he meets Grace Town (Reinhart), he realizes he may have found that spark he’s been looking for all his young life. Yet Grace has a “heartbreaking secret” that may impact the pair’s romantic future.
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Reinhart, whose poetry book Swimming Lessons debuts in September, told TIME she was excited to do a project outside of Riverdale.
“When you’re on a show for X amount of years you feel like you want to do something that you’re in control of. And so that made me, you know, want to write my poetry book that I wrote, and that made me want to really kind of develop a script from the ground up,” she explained to the outlet.
Chemical Hearts follows in the same vein as Five Feet Apart, starring Reinhart’s Riverdale co-star and on-again, off-again boyfriend Cole Sprouse. In the film Sprouse plays a teen living with cystic fibrosis who falls in love with another patient at the hospital, played by Haley Lu Richardson. While Five Feet Apart shined light on the cystic fibrosis community, Chemical Hearts will reportedly focus on mental health issues.
“When I saw his movie Five Feet Apart, that was so cool for me to see something that he was a part of completely on his own, that I had nothing to do with, so I could watch more so as an admirer,” Reinhart, who has praised the film before on social media, added to TIME.
As with many teen love stories, tears will be inevitable — from the characters, and likely from viewers. At least you have the summer to emotionally prepare.