Spoilers ahead. There’s a moment in every Sick Teen (or young person) Movie when you know everything is not as it seems: a fragment of dialogue, a sidelong glance, or a fraught moment that indicates impending doom — that one of the two main love interests is not going to make it to the end of the movie. In 2002’s A Walk to Remember, it’s when Mandy Moore’s character Jamie boldly makes popular bad boy Landon (Shane West) promise to never fall in love with her. In 2014’s The Fault in Our Stars, it’s when Augustus (Ansel Elgort), at that point in remission from cancer, uses his Make-A-Wish wish to take girlfriend Hazel to Amsterdam to meet her dream author. More recently in 2025’s My Oxford Year, it’s the moment when professor Jamie (Corey Mylchreest) inexplicably pulls away from Anna (Sofia Carson) after their first night together. 

In director Lasse Hallström’s newly released The Map That Leads to You,  when Jack (played by Riverdale’s KJ Apa), who is on a whirlwind adventure through Spain with new love interest Heather (Madelyn Cline), refuses to be in a group photo with his friends (he thinks people should be experiencing the moment IRL instead of trying to document it for the future), viewers know there’s more to it than just camera shyness. The character, a 21st century rolling stone, has a track record for wanting to be in the moment instead of documenting it. 

From the moment Jack bumps into Heather on a train to Barcelona in this adaptation of J.P. Monninger’s 2017 novel, he encourages the careful planner to embrace spontaneity. Heather is on her grand Euro adventure before returning home to a job in banking and a stable — albeit kind of boring — life, while Jack is  on a quest to follow a route his great grandfather wrote about in his journal.. Heather, who maps out every moment of her life, ditches her rigid itinerary and regimented lifestyle to share the adventure, with the pair breaking into and spending the night in a tram car in Barcelona, chasing down passport thieves, adventuring around the coast, and running with the bulls in Pamplona. This chance encounter with Jack is pivotal for Heather, who discovers with him a sense of freedom she was missing and wants to continue following, both with him and on her own.  

And it’s this realization that makes the eventual reveal even more heart wrenching — Jack is ill and doesn’t know how much time he has left.  

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s meant to. As Madelyn Cline tells Refinery29, Hallström told the actors to channel the essence of movies like A Walk to Remember and Before Sunrise (which doesn’t deal with death per se, but the tragedy of looming separation from the person you love). “We wanted it to feel real and lovely and relatable, and we wanted it to be gut wrenching,” Cline says.

Most importantly, these stories  leave the remaining character with a lesson: to go on and have a big life, all the richer because their lost love taught them to truly embrace life. 

It can be a frustrating, albeit extremely popular, trope. The reason we continue to be drawn to these films about young people dying is arguably the same reason we wholeheartedly embrace teen shows dealing with grief or show and movies that scare us. They tap into some of our greatest fears: Dying young and not being able to fulfill your goals, while offering viewers a way to confront these fears head on. While death in any case is a tragedy, it’s exacerbated by the complexities of youth, as yet another issue young people have to grapple with along with the normal hardships of growing up, navigating your identity and trying to fit  in. Having someone close to you die at a young age is scary and unexplainable, and at least in film and TV, viewers are able to see that these tragedies are not in vain, that something good comes out of death — because it has to. 

Regardless of the reason why we’re drawn to these movies, the question remains: Do characters like Jamie and Augustus have to die in order for those around them to make the decision to live? Can’t we  cherish life without the tragedy of  death? Does loss have to be the price of appreciation?

Cline says, for Heather, “It’s not [about] losing Jack, it’s about losing what he made her understand that she was missing from her own life.”  In this case, it’s Heather understanding the power inside her can come from making her own decisions, rather than basing them on what is expected of her. “You don’t need a man to learn that lesson,” Cline says. But “[Jack] represents everything that she needed to learn for herself.”

At first, Heather’s meticulously planned itinerary — and future — doesn’t leave any space for surprises, but by the end of the movie she realizes that “you don’t have to settle for any sort of status quo and you can be whatever you want,” Cline says. And more importantly, that you can find happiness and fulfillment in that. “Your thoughts do shape a lot of your reality,” Cline says. “Truly, you are a product of what you give energy to and what your thoughts are.”

But while these lessons may be more impactful when dealing with the loss of a young person, they’re also applicable to people at any age and in any life circumstance. “It comes down to: Do you want to be happy or do you want to not be happy, irrespective of whatever is in front of you?,” Apa says. “You can either have the perspective of, this sucks, I don’t want to do this, or I get to choose who I want to be in relationship to whatever it is that I’m doing.” 

The key difference with this film is that, thankfully, Jack doesn’t die. Unlike most “Sick Teen” movies, The Map That Leads to You pushes beyond the typical trope. By having both characters make it to the end credits, it allows viewers to see the ways in which Heather has in turn also impacted Jack —and the lessons she can teach him, leaving viewers with a story in which both characters actively make a choice, instead of reacting to circumstances, to embrace their lives, whatever comes next. 

It’s an updated take on the typical trope, and one that, while not necessarily always pulled off without coming across as cheesy or earnest, is appreciated; at least for its attempt to eschew the unequal dynamics of these relationships and show how both characters, Jack and Heather, can learn from each other. 

“Heather and Jack are two sides of the same coin,” Cline says. “Where Jack has based his decisions off of why is this happening to me and Heather is the one who approaches it with gratitude.”

After initially trying to push Heather away, for fear of having her watch him die, Jack is forced to follow his own advice: respecting Heather’s decision about her future— one that, at least for now, includes him — and choosing gratitude for what they have together. 

“She teaches him the final and probably most important lesson,” Apa says, “which is [that] you don’t get to make that decision for me or anyone.”

“That’s his pivotal moment,” Apa says. “Him dealing with this illness and really coming to terms with the fact that life is impermanent, and what do you do with that information?” Which is the question that the movie leaves both Jack and Heather, not to mention viewers with — and to figure out for themselves.

The Map That Leads to You is now streaming on Prime Video.

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