Directed by James Ponsoldt
Written by James Ponsoldt and Benjamin Percy
Starring Lia Barnett, Sanai Victoria, Madalen Mills, Eden Grace Redfield, Megan Mullaly, and Lake Bell
Rated PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour and 27 minutes
In theaters August 12

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

James Ponsoldt exists in a vacuum for me. I associate him with The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour, two films that made my year end lists in 2013 and 2015, respectively. And then there is a vast chasm where I didn’t see anything he did, but that is most likely due to the fact that his only feature between 2015 and 2022 was his poorly received adaptation of Dave Eggers’ poorly received novel The Circle from 2017. I know I know, that is a lot of dates, but I’m just trying to figure out where Ponsoldt went astray, because Summering is one of those movies that is such a mess that it casts the filmmaker’s entire oeuvre into question. It’s stunningly bad to a point where it’s almost impressive to watch someone use whatever goodwill they had built in the industry and burn it all down with one woeful movie.

It’s not fun taking a well-intentioned little indie movie out behind the woodshed, but you know what else isn’t fun? Watching Summering. It’s a cinematic car crash that unfurls in slow motion which is wild given that the movie doesn’t even crack 90 minutes. The premise itself isn’t so egregious and reads like a modern spin on Stand By Me: Four tween girls on the cusp of middle school discover a dead body. Ok, you have my attention. But whereas the body in Stand by Me is merely a MacGuffin used to drive a beautiful story of friendship and lost innocence, the body in Summering shows up in the first ten minutes and the entire plot is built around the girls inexplicably deciding not to tell anyone about it. Moreover, they take it upon themselves to go full CSI and identify the dead man and the reasoning for this is never explained outside of a vague notion that their moms might not let them do anything fun if they tell them what they found in the woods. I used to work with tweenage kids, so I know all about how their brains aren't fully developed and their decision-making is often questionable, but I never in my life have met any kids that would be this dumb. Having characters act like morons for the sake of plot is my biggest movie pet peeve, and it’s on full display here.

I am fully aware that isn’t cool to take potshots at four tween girls, but you know what else isn’t cool? Putting four tween actresses in a situation where they have to act like total numbskulls for 90 minutes. While it feels like we are living in an era where child acting has never been better (let’s call it the Post-Saoirse Ronan in Atonement Era), it takes a certain kind of director to draw out those performances and Ponsoldt does a disservice to all four of these girls’ careers. That sounds harsh, sure, but these performances are...not good. A lot of that is due to the ineptitude of the script, but the performances these very young actresses turn in are uneven at best and baffling at their worst. For instance, I thought the main girl of the quartet Daisy (Lia Barnett) was adopted from Russia for the first half of the movie because it sounded like she was speaking in a Russian accent. And lo, once she gets more lines in third act it becomes apparent that she isn’t Russian. Daisy’s mom (Lake Bell) is a cop, so when the girls decide to investigate the dead body, Daisy takes a gun her mom just has hanging out in an end table. You know what movie didn’t need a tweenager wielding a gun for no reason? This movie!

Judging young actors is tough, but I think it’s safe to say that in the hands of a more capable director and a more capable script (that, say, skipped the whole dead body investigation angle and just focused on trying to capture the melancholy of the last days of childhood before becoming a teenager) we would be a different conversation. They frequently have the right energy, but the performances are penned in by the plot and every scene feels like a line reading. Nothing is natural about the performances because nothing is natural about this movie, it’s forced and weird and unpleasant all the way through. The girls’ moms are played by Megan Mullaly, Lake Bell, Sarah Cooper, and Ashley Madekwe, and all of them save for maybe Cooper (a stand up best known for doing lip synched parodies of Donald Trump speeches, still, she’s solid here) are all veterans with range and even they get bogged down by the clunky script when the moms’ find out what the kids are up to. This is the sort of movie where no one comes away looking good, and the sort you wish the distributor would have shelved it. There’s no shame in realizing you produced a bad movie, but when you release something this bad to the public? Oof.