HAZEL Grace (Shailene Woodley) isn't your average teenage girl. Riddled with terminal cancer and in the constant company of an oxygen tank, Hazel strikes a balance between living the short remainder of her life to the fullest and keeping her parents happy attending support groups and smiling at doctors' unhelpful ideas.

Employing an interesting coping method to deal with the unyielding diagnosis, Hazel has perfected a distain for the conventional and a curiously acerbic wit mostly through the aid of her favorite book and its intriguingly unfinished characters.

At what seems like yet another eye-roll worthy misguided support meeting, Hazel meets Gus (Ansel Elgort). With a similarly biting personality, Gus has been in remission for over a year from his own form of cancer but now poses a new threat to Hazel, a challenge.

Although Hazel attempts to keep the relationship platonic, when Gus uses his saved "wish" to whisk Hazel off to Holland to meet her favorite author Van Houten (Willem Dafoe) to get the literary answers she desperately craves, they can't help but form a miraculously deep bond.

Wading through the waters of teen angst with the ever present tolling of their own mortality, the dynamic duo attempt to cram an entire lifespans worth of love, happiness and passion into the time they are granted.

Much like 2012's film Now is Good based on Jenny Downham's 2007 novel Before I die, The Fault in our stars based on John Green's novel of the same name tackles the tragic business of being young, alive and in love.

Fun, thrilling and realistic, this unforced tear-jerker is a drama that will strike a chord with teens without relying on seemly ever-present supernatural trappings of vampires and werewolves.

Having previously played brother and sister in this year's Divergent, Woodley and Elgort slightly miss on the romantic mark but have good friend chemistry. As always, Dafoe is fabulous and a master at playing characters you just loathe, while the rest of the cast is merely there to fill out space.

The Verdict: Less endearing than expected, this film does conjure genuine emotion due to its strong female lead.