FITTING IN - Mark Reviews Movies

Fitting In, Blue Fox Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 1, 2024

Being a teenager is difficult enough without some medical diagnosis seeming to confirm what you already fear: You're different from everyone else, and nobody is going to understand you. That dread is the core of Fitting In, which seems to announce itself outright as a kind of comedy about a teenage girl who just wants to experience sex for the first time. What's in store for Lindy (Maddie Ziegler), though, is much tougher, and writer/director Molly McGlynn presents that challenge with honesty and sensitivity.

Simply from appearance, Lindy is a "normal" teenager—whatever that means. She lives with her single mother Rita (Emily Hampshire), who's back on the dating market after her husband left when Lindy was just a toddler and recovering from a mastectomy to remove a cancerous growth. She has a best friend named Vivian (Djouliet Amara), who has been close to Lindy since the two were kids, and a major crush on Adam (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), a geek at heart who has become quite popular after getting into sports and gaining some muscle.

The film opens with Lindy imagining what her first time with Adam might be like, and as long as he likes her as much as she likes him, Lindy's ready and willing to make that fantasy a reality in the very near future. There's just one potential issue, which the teen doesn't think is too big a deal, and that's the fact that 16-year-old Lindy has yet to get her first period. Her mother points out that she started menstruating relatively late, too, so no, it can't be anything about which to worry just yet.

A routine trip to a gynecologist to obtain birth control reveals the reason. Lindy has a rare condition called MRKH syndrome. Essentially, she has ovaries and a short vaginal canal, but the rest of the reproductive organs aren't present in Lindy's body.

It's a shock for the teen, who just sits in the doctor's office with her mother, as the doctor's words and explanations fade into the background amidst Rita's sobs of disbelief and Lindy's eyes wandering to the photos of all the babies the gynecologist helped deliver. Whatever dreams or plans this girl might have had in regards to a family until this point essentially end right there, and McGlynn simply allows the moment to linger with the weight of all that.

The surprise for us, then, is how the filmmaker does let that moment happen and shape how we see Lindy for the rest of this story. One moment, she's just an ordinary teen, wondering if her crush likes her and excited about making the varsity track team and worried that Vivian, her teammate and friend, is hurt about not making the upper-level squad. Now, she's still 16, but Lindy has reevaluate everything about her life. It's not easy to consider on her own, but for her, it's even more difficult to talk openly or at all about her condition—even with the people closest to her.

From that opening fantasy, McGlynn clearly establishes an internal world for Lindy, and the film lives in it, by way of quiet moments and the subtle expressions of Ziegler's performance, as much as it deals with her now increasingly complicated external one. There's a level of introspection here that's admirable, because we know what Lindy is thinking—even when and especially because she doesn't talk about it—and watch as it comes to define this unexpected start of an equally unexpected life.

The key to the drama, then, is that Lindy desperately wants to feel "normal," so she hides the truth, lies about assorted things, and gradually pushes away the people who are or try to get close to her. Vivian, for example, can tell something is off about her best friend's mood, but Lindy can only get defensive about it. Adam does like Lindy, but multiple doctors have pointed out that sex is nearly impossible for her at this point. She doesn't want to explain that to him, out of fear of how he'll react, and the silence and evasion just look like rejection on her part. It's such a recognizable drive and reaction that one can't help but see it as anything but "normal."

While the film gets at that idea, it's quite frank about Lindy's condition, too. This includes the use of dilators, discussions of "corrective" surgery, and broader questions of gender identity. The film makes room for some humor, because it is the story of an embarrassed teenager in some way, but like the focus on Lindy's thinking and how she tries to avoid being seen as "different," this side of the story is mostly treated with thoughtfulness and insight. The presence of Jax (Ki Griffin), an intersex classmate in whom Lindy comes to confide, is especially compassionate.

Not all of this succeeds, particularly when the third act depends on a momentary drunken slip of the tongue and a lot of rumors swirling around the school (not to mention a rift between Lindy and Vivian that seems entirely avoidable, even under the trying circumstances of Lindy's current experiences). In the big picture of Fitting In, though, such plot-heavy bit of melodrama don't diminish the film's real accomplishment. That's to help us understand this character and her condition, while making the case that "normal" is more a state of mind than some objective, clear-cut definition or what others say and think about a person.

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