Yesterday review: A chilling account of the harrowing symptoms of one man’s brain injury
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The phrase “feel-good comedy of the summer” should cause no small amount of bile to rise in your throat, but Yesterday is inescapably just that.
A movie that seems algorithmically laser-targeted for success, it arrives just as ravenous audiences are lifting their faces from the dessicated carcass of last summer’s Mamma Mia 2, and are leering hungrily at this new thing, a plump jukebox rom-com thrown from a jeep by a cackling Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle.
It also arrives at a point in history when The Beatles’ back catalogue can be more readily licensed – the band was famously the most notable Spotify and iTunes hold-out until Christmas Eve 2015.
The last ingredient to make this Curtis-mobile really fly? The mass hallucination that fuels society’s inexplicable acceptance of Ed Sheeran as a tolerable on-screen presence.
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Yesterday tells the story of Jack Malik, a failing singer-songwriter who gets hit by a bus and wakes up in a world where The Beatles never existed. The realisation that he’s slipped into a bizarro alternate reality hits when he plays McCartney’s titular, melancholy classic for a table of his stunned and teary-eyed mates, after which he sets about rewriting their biggest hits from memory, claiming them as his own.
It’s cleverer and more thoughtfully constructed than you’d expect, with Jack’s meteoric rise to stardom requiring more than just a set of classic songs to sustain it. An early scene where Jack belts out a rendition of Let It Be in a local boozer only to be met with indifference from an unfamiliar audience asks us to consider whether we’d recognise a bonafide classic if it were right in front of us, and to question just how much of The Beatles’ popularity and legacy is built upon decades of global cultural momentum. It also considers what today’s music industry would do with such a golden goose.
Yesterday sticks fastidiously to the tried and tested Curtis formula. Cheerful and heartwarming, its only real weakness is its predictability. The feel-good comedy of the summer indeed.