Netflix’s Girl Haunts Boy is a terrific example of a teen film exploring the loneliness that comes with grieving in a simple and fun, non-depressive way. The film tells the story of Cole, a 17-year-old who has recently lost his dad and feels completely lost by himself. Just moved to a new town, Cole has to find himself as well as establish a new life with new friends. This is difficult when all you want to do is live in the past and try to relive old memories to make yourself feel better. But, when Cole finds a mysterious ring in his new room and puts it on, he’s shocked to learn a few new things about the world. One, that ghosts exist, and two, he has a ghost haunting him at that moment. Girl Haunts Boy begins with Bea, a young girl in the 1920s, visiting a museum and wandering off into an area she’s not meant to be in. Bea finds an interesting-looking ring and removes it from its display box. By then the security guard shows up, asking her to leave the restricted area. Bea tells him that she’s going to show him a magic trick, which he doesn’t care for, so she ends up taking the ring with her. This is when everything gets messed up because, as Bea is leaving the museum, she gets hit by a car and dies. In the present day, Bea is the ghost that haunts Cole, and they form an unlikely bond.
Spoiler Alert
How Does Cole Go Back To Music?
After a little bit of fright, Cole starts to get curious about Bea. He finds her diary in the room and decides to take a sneak peek, but she doesn’t let him get far. Cole soon starts to wear the ring often, and they start to interact more. Bea and Cole may be years apart in experience, but they’ve got one common interest: music. Cole’s given up on his musical talent since his dad died, though, and it’s Bea who helps him get back to it. Soon after becoming friends, Cole and Bea realize that she’s not trapped in the house but in the ring, because when he wears it and steps outside, she can leave the house too. Since Bea has so much to see, Cole becomes her tour guide, and soon enough they’re besties. In the meantime, at school, a girl named Lydia tries to become friends with Cole. She’s a nice girl with peculiar interests, i.e., someone who will eventually help Cole figure out how the ring works, but we’ll get there in a bit. Cole’s a great student and actually cares about what he’s reading, but the problem is, he’s so self-conscious that he doesn’t let people see his true self. His teacher realizes this quite easily and ends up giving him a D in his essay. All he wants from him is to be expressive of his own thoughts rather than do something he’s expected to do just for the sake of it. I suppose being depressed and self-conscious go hand in hand. It’s easy to lose yourself when the person who helped you find yourself suddenly disappears.
Bea ends up coaxing Cole to play a song in school one day and notices that he’s really good. Cole also decides to do something special for Bea when he learns that she died on Halloween night. Bea loves to see how the world’s changed since she died, but she also wishes she could go back to New York and “feel alive” again. Cole decides to take her to a Great Gatsby costume party. This also happens to be the subject of his essay, so it’s technically research work, no? Anyway, when they get to the party, Cole and Bea realize that people can actually see her, and for one night, they hang out for real, touching each other, dancing together, and kissing. It’s of course magical; however, by the end of the night, when Cole tries to touch her, he can’t anymore.Back to drifting between invisible and visible, Bea then persuades Cole to participate in the school talent show. I guess for her it’s also trying to make sure he doesn’t lose out on experiences that she missed out on. Bea loves planes and wanted to be a pilot back in the day.
How Did Bea Get Cursed?
Now, Lydia’s really perceptive, and it seems she’s realized by herself that Cole’s got some darkness around him (probably his sad aura, but okay), and discovers that the ring he had was part of a two-piece way back in the day. According to the legend, anyone who separated the two rings is cursed to die a violent death and then roam the earth for eternity, unless the two rings are brought back together. Lydia tells Cole about this and tells him that the ring’s currently in New York for an auction. However, distracted by the fact that he loves Bea’s company and doesn’t want to let her go, he ends up not telling her about the auction until it’s too late.To Cole’s surprise, when he does end up telling Bea about the cursed ring, she lashes out at him and tells him that he’s being selfish because she isn’t haunting him to make him feel better about himself, but because she’s cursed to be alone forever. Cole’s not evil, of course, and neither is Bea, but their lives are meant to be separate, and Cole can live with the happy memories. Cole then tries to call the museum to figure out who’s bought the ring, but he’s pleasantly surprised to learn that the ring is still in town. Cole and Bea break into the museum to return the ring to its rightful place despite not knowing whether that’ll kill Bea off for good or if she’ll get to live an actual life again back in the 20s. And just like that, they say their final goodbyes. Cole returns the ring and goes back to his old life. When Cole gets home and opens Bea’s album, he notices that there are now more pictures of Bea. She grew up to work with planes and presumably become a pilot. She even got married and grew old surrounded by loved ones. Or at least that’s what Cole would like to imagine.
During Girl Haunts Boy’s ending, Cole is a changed human being. The whole point of the film is to not dwell on the past, and it’s alright to grieve. The past cannot be revisited physically, but your memories are what stay with you forever. Bea helps Cole realize that even with his father gone, he can still do the things they used to love to do together because it’ll help him stay connected with him. In a way, Bea is Cole’s Daisy, someone unattainable who drives him to make something of himself. Of course, unlike Gatsby, Cole manages to move on before it’s too late for him. Cole goes back to his music, and at the end of the film, he even sings a beautiful song in memory of Bea. It appears as if he’s actually playing it to her as the two timelines merge, making it look like she’s standing right in front of him. I guess this establishes, since it’s a fantasy film, that Bea remembered Cole always, and did what she had to do in his memory, and we can imagine the same for Cole too, and he’ll go on to do great things thanks to how he holds onto Bea. Not literally, but metaphorically, that is. The ghost of his past, if you will.
