Four best friends about to start high school realize their lives are about to change forever. So the last weekend of the summer they set out to make the most of it. James Ponsoldt returns with his sixth feature film, following the catastrophic misfire that was 2017's star-studded tech thriller The Circle. As is often the case with expert filmmakers trying to shed high-profile flops, Ponsoldt's new film is a lo-fi back-to-basics affair, but one that lacks the confident execution to deliver on his ambitions. .
It's the last week before four friends, Dina (Madalen Mills), Lola (Sanai Victoria), Daisy (Lia Barnett), and Mari (Eden Grace Redfield), head off to start high school, and it turns into a week in the one they will surely never forget after they stumbled upon the dead body of a man at the bottom of a bridge. However, instead of immediately alerting the authorities, the quartet launch their own investigation to find out who the man was and what happened to him.
By unique measures and not quite, this is, on the one hand, a very typical Sundance premiere indie project with its airy visuals and skittish reality check, but through its bungling tone it becomes something more bizarre and difficult to handle, but perhaps also more interesting.
Director: James Ponsoldt
Writers: Benjamin Percy, James Ponsoldt
Stars: Lia Barnett, Sanai Victoria, Madalen Mills
Comparisons to Stand By Me are both inevitable and justified, updating that classic text for contemporary audiences in a way that's deranged enough to remain plausible. It's not that hard to believe that kids would snap a picture of the corpse on their phones and then try to identify it by showing the image at a local bar. This is the world we live in today.
Yet Rob Reiner's coming-of-age classic still has a singular tone, while Ponsoldt's film often fails to reconcile its healthy and deeply felt examination of youthful anxiety about the future with his disconcerting discovery. Unnervingly, there are periodic surreal moments that diverge into horror-movie territory, with kids seeing peculiar, possibly spectral presences in their midst, often feeling silly and buff rather than livening the mood.
Ponsoldt said in a pre-film introduction that he wanted to make a film for her daughter, to properly represent her and people like her. And yet, it's hard to imagine many young people actually connecting with what's probably much more appealing to adults who might at least find its muddled execution compelling.
The film is at its best when it focuses on the simplicity of young people yearning for an endless summer, a basically universal ideal that children and adults alike can appreciate. Fears of puberty, of parting with close friends, and indeed of what comes after, both in life and in death, loom at all times, but are too often stifled under mannered dialogue that distracts and scatterbrained story choices. Of course, all children have their own distinctive problems in addition to the usual existential concerns (absent fathers, alcoholic mothers, etc.) and though Ponsoldt briefly represses the uniquely terrifying pains of childhood, he is constantly disturbed by the corpse subplot that lingers like, well, a corpse.
The central quartet of actors are certainly trying hard here, and it's hard to fault any of them for not making Ponsoldt's dialogue feel believable from her mouth. Cinema has shown time and time again how difficult it is for adults to write convincingly to children, and Summering offers yet another example of children speaking too well for their own good. In the adult stakes, Lake Bell has some meaty moments to sink his teeth into as the aforementioned drunken police officer, though for the most part the adults are basically afterthoughts, as they probably should be.
Like most of Ponsoldt's films, this is at least one look, making the most of its rural Utah setting through the sharp lens of DP Greta Zozula. The generally straightforward presentation and unknown cast help root the film in its place, but the higher moments, whether it's the kids randomly floating through the air or the aforementioned horror movie jumps, hit it hard. Overall, this up-and-coming character drama mostly just dumbly entertains itself until it grinds to a halt with its underwhelming conclusion, and even at only 85 minutes long, it's pretty rough.
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