Mark Reviews Movies: PREMATURE (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2020

We can tell why Ayanna (Zora Howard), the quiet and shy protagonist of Premature, is so quickly drawn to Isaiah (Joshua Boone), an aspiring composer and music producer. He's intelligent, charming, and thoughtful.

Ayanna herself is an aspiring writer, preparing to go to college. While her friends and the guys within their orbit are talking about cellphone plans and sex, Isaiah thinks about and discusses life, the world, and time in ways that go far beyond himself and his experiences. It only takes one date for Ayanna to fall for Isaiah, and from there, their relationship is a montage of sex, which eventually leads to a tough decision for the young woman.

Those are the basics to the story of co-writer/director Rashaad Ernesto Green's movie (based on his 2008 short of the same name). While it features a fine performance from Howard (who also co-wrote the screenplay), the movie never really helps us to understand Ayanna as anything more than a vague sense of her potential, her romantic feelings for Isaiah, and the difficulties that make up the melodramatic elements of the later story.

Ayanna is immediately established as shy, spending her time writing poetry, although she's willing to talk to men on her friends' behalf. Once she meets and starts talking to Isaiah, the character is exclusively seen through the relationship. Isaiah does most of the talking (mostly about himself and his ideas), and Ayanna is there, to look upon him with adoration. She becomes jealous when another woman from his past arrives, and even Ayanna's poetry, which forms the voice-over for her solitary moments, is all about him and her feelings for him.

We never get a sense of Ayanna as her own, individual person. When the other shoe inevitably drops in her relationship with Isaiah (She's willing to give up her plans, on account of a development that forces her into that difficult decision-making process, and he starts to ignore her), the movie, now entirely about Ayanna, suffers, because it's about her circumstances, not her.

Premature is, in a way, about how love—young love, in particular—can overshadow everything else about a person and his or her life. The issue is that the movie's central character is entirely defined by that relationship—its highs, its lows, its ultimate uncertainty. There is no one for this romance to overshadow.

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