James Ponsoldt’s Summering (2022) is one of those films that wants to be deep and whimsical, but ends up face-planting into a pile of sincerity and forgotten potential. It’s a coming-of-age story so devoid of urgency, charm, or purpose that it feels less like a movie and more like a long group text thread where no one knows how to end the conversation. You can practically hear the pitch: “It’s Stand By Me… but with girls… and it’s about trauma… and friendship… and glowing bees.” The result? An awkward blend of tween melodrama, Lifetime-movie logic, and an existential mystery that never gets solved—because apparently solving things is for people with actual plot structure.
Set in suburban Nowheresville during the last weekend of summer vacation, Summering follows four twelve-year-old girls—Daisy, Dina, Mari, and Lola—who stumble upon a dead man in the woods and react with the emotional weight of someone finding a lost cat poster. No panic, no real fear—just some awkward staring, followed by a bunch of scenes where they wander around town asking questions like they’re playing a very low-stakes game of Clue. Their decision to not call the cops is explained away with some vague, hand-wavy dialogue about “adults not understanding,” which would be fine if the script gave them anything close to actual personalities or reasons to do anything at all.
Daisy is the default lead, played by Lia Barnett, and she spends most of the film looking either mildly confused or slightly constipated by existential dread. Her mom (played by Lake Bell) is a cop, which theoretically should raise the stakes, but in practice only serves to add another layer of stilted adult dialogue and narrative dead weight. The other girls have their own quirks: one likes crystals, one talks about ghosts, one says things like “I feel weird inside” as if she’s narrating a tampon commercial written by E.E. Cummings. And that’s about as deep as it gets. These aren’t characters. They’re Pinterest boards in crop tops.
Now, a kids-on-a-mission movie doesn’t need high-octane action to work. But it does need momentum. Summering has none. The girls spend the film wandering between vaguely symbolic set pieces like a spirit animal bar crawl: a church, an abandoned hotel, a creepy forest, and a fountain that might be magic? Maybe? It’s unclear. The script peppers in flashes of horror and fantasy elements—a dead body with no explanation, shadowy figures in the woods, one girl’s ghostly hallucinations—but it’s all half-baked and directionless, like someone started writing a Goosebumps episode and then got distracted by a mindfulness podcast.
The tone is what really kills it. Summering can’t decide if it wants to be a nostalgic slice-of-life about pre-teen friendship or a supernatural murder mystery with hints of grief and existential crisis. So it tries to do both—and ends up doing neither. One moment the girls are giggling over silly dares and taking selfies in graveyards, the next they’re waxing poetic about death, time, and the unknowable void with the kind of heavy-handed dialogue that feels like a rough draft of a college admissions essay.
Let’s talk about the dead guy. He’s the most interesting character in the movie, and he’s face-down in a ravine. Who is he? Why is he there? What happened to him? Great questions. The film has no interest in answering them. Instead, we get a string of scenes where the girls try to solve the “mystery” by Googling, asking a few random adults vague questions, and then abandoning the whole thing entirely to go have emotional bonding time in an empty school gym. It’s like Scooby-Doo without the dog, the van, the mystery, or the point.
And the adults? They exist, technically. Lake Bell shows up periodically to frown, monologue, and wear detective clothing that says “I’m emotionally unavailable but trying.” Megan Mullally appears as another mom, and it’s honestly hard to tell if she’s acting or just trying to remember what movie she’s in. The adult characters drift in and out, delivering exposition and parental concern like NPCs in a very low-budget indie RPG. They feel like afterthoughts, which might be forgivable if the kids were compelling. But they aren’t.
Even the cinematography feels confused. Ponsoldt, who previously gave us the excellent The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour, opts for dreamy lighting and handheld intimacy here, but it only highlights how little there is to actually look at. The forest scenes try to evoke mystery but end up feeling like a PBS nature special shot during a heatwave. The town is generic. The interiors are flat. It’s all very… beige.
And then there’s the score. Dear god, the score. It’s the kind of ambient piano-and-strings mix that sounds like it’s trying to lull you into a coma of manufactured nostalgia. Every moment is drenched in emotional manipulation, even when nothing is happening. Especially when nothing is happening.
By the final act, the movie abandons any pretense of narrative cohesion and descends into a foggy montage of introspective whispering and slow-motion walks toward metaphorical growth. The dead man is never identified. The fantasy elements are never explained. The emotional resolutions are handed out like participation trophies. And the girls—well, they end the film as they began it: vaguely moody, sort of scared, and still not calling the police.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 magical fountains of unresolved storytelling.
Summering is a film that tries to capture the fragile beauty of youth and the ache of growing up—but ends up feeling like a summer camp skit about death written during naptime. It’s not moving. It’s not mysterious. It’s just confused, undercooked, and padded with monologues about the soul from characters who still use glitter glue. Avoid unless you’re into storylines that wander off into the woods and forget to come back.