My girlfriend scoffed when someone offered her a sample pack of tissues as we walked into a preview of Me Before You. “What do they think this is,” she asked, “Inside Out?”

No, it’s certainly not Inside Out. That movie — which, unlike Me Before You, actually made both of us cry — is a rich and imaginative allegory about universal human emotions. Although Me Before You doesn’t present the human mind as a literal amusement park, of the two films it’s the one that’s really a pure fantasy.

Based on the 2012 novel by Jojo Moyes (who also wrote the screenplay), Thea Sharrock’s film tells the story of Louisa (Emilia Clarke): a beautiful, virtuous, underemployed, and colorfully dressed young British woman who’s hired to serve as a companion to Will (Sam Claflin), a smolderingly attractive young man who is quadriplegic as the result of an accident.

That word, “companion,” is significant. Louisa’s not medically trained, nor is she expected to be: she’s not responsible for any of the inconvenient details of caring for a man with extremely limited mobility. She’s just there — this is clearly stated — to cheer Will up. (Medical care is provided by a handsome and kind professional named Nathan, who seems like the film’s most genuinely eligible character but only takes romantic interest when and where it’s expedient for the plot. What a guy.)

Without spoiling any developments that the movie poster doesn’t give away, I’ll say that the story vaults squarely into the long tradition of female characters who are practically perfect but not quite, needing only to be swept off their feet by men who will challenge them in constructive ways such that Their Lives Are Changed Forever whether or not the romance ultimately works out.

Will is initially kind of an ass, but we’re asked to forgive that due to his understandable bitterness about the accident. We know he’s going to turn out to be a good man deep down inside, though, because he has a trifecta of characteristics that we like to falsely associate with virtue: he’s rich, he’s good-looking, and he has a disability.

The film is already under heavy fire from people with disabilities; in the words of one advocate, “the message of the film is that disability is tragedy and disabled people are better off dead.” An even broader criticism of the film (this one’s mine) is that Will isn’t really a person at all: he’s a pretty face and a wheelchair. The film isn’t a tearjerker, because we just don’t know who these characters are.

Louisa (whom Will, like Nick Nolte with Barbra Streisand in Prince of Tides, addresses exclusively by her surname) is played by Clarke with outrageous charm, a performance so committed to this fantastic scenario that she keeps you from rolling your eyes if only because you don’t want to look away. Even so, I’m not exaggerating when I say that Disney’s Cinderella has a more complexly developed psychological profile.

As for Will, he gets approximately 30 seconds to make his case that “this isn’t my life.” The statement opens up some potentially interesting avenues for investigation — if it isn’t his, whose life is it? could he possibly have had a meaningful relationship with Louisa before his accident? — but the film bolts away from any possibility of problematizing these characters.

The result is an extraordinarily juvenile story, and really, the biggest surprise for me — given an ad campaign that makes the movie look like Oscar bait — is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything more. I hate to use “juvenile” in a pejorative way, but this really does seem like a film designed to appeal to ten-year-olds. Hopefully they don’t go straight from this to Game of Thrones.

– Jay Gabler