Mark Reviews Movies: SUMMERING

Summering, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2022

Co-writer/director James Ponsoldt's Summering is about a literal passing of the seasons, as summer is coming to an end, and a figurative one, as a quartet of girls are about to enter middle school and aren't sure if their friendship will last the change. In a broader sense, it's intrinsically about a different kind of change over the generations, since the setup features something of a familiar premise. Some kids find a dead body, and now, there's the question of what they're going to do about the discovery.

Decades ago, kids in a similar situation might have run home screaming or poked the corpse with a stick before doing so. In Ponsoldt and co-screenwriter Benjamin Percy's modern-day tale, the kids aren't too disgusted or scared (The fear comes later, as the girls envision the man's ghost). They've seen this sort of thing on television all the time, after all. These girls know the ins and outs of those cop shows, either from watching them with family or sneaking viewings away from parents, so when they find a dead body, these kids know exactly what to do. They have to start an investigation.

That's more or less the plot of this movie, which wears itself thin pretty quickly—both because the central mystery isn't much of one (The girls come up with an almost-certain theory simply by looking up) and because of deeper issues that run through the whole of this story. Despite the hook of the girls trying to find the corpse's identity and who he was before he died, it really doesn't care about the dead man, except as a metaphor for how growing up can be a literal killer. Because the screenplay is so concerned with an amateur investigation that involves little and amounts to even less, the worries and fears of the story's four main characters feel like a second thought.

Our narrator is Daisy (Lia Barnett), one of the foursome of friends, who offers some opening thoughts about the promise of summer and the uncertainty of what the new school year, which is about to start after one final weekend, will bring. She's the quiet one of the quartet, and Daisy admits that she often feels as if she needs her friends more than they need her.

To be sure, Lola (Sanai Victoria) comes across as pretty confident for her age, and Dina (Madalen Mills) knows more about technology than any of them or, for that matter, a good number of adults (That becomes important when the girls sneak into school in order to use a computer, which Dina uses to hunt the dark web for personal information about the dead guy). Even Mari (Eden Grace Redfield), the oldest but shortest of the bunch, is a bit of a rebel against her kindly conservative mother Stacie (Megan Mullally).

The three other mothers—played by Lake Bell, Sarah Cooper, and Ashley Madekwe—are of a similar mold, although Daisy' mother, Bell's Laura, is inattentive because of her job as a cop and her grief over the "disappearance" of Daisy's father. That absence of attentiveness leads to Daisy being able to steal a pistol from the house, but since this is framed more as a fable than anything realistic, the gun is just a helpful tool at one point (The other girls even know Daisy should shoot when lightning strikes in order to hide the report). The girls, obviously, are trying to hide their detective work from their parents, lest some official investigation interrupt their last weekend of summer, but that leaves the question of a different group of adults, who clearly know the girls have found a dead body but don't do anything about it.

Such details—the kids' easy access to and familiarity with a gun (although let's not forget the quick admiration for the thing), everyone's nearly apathetic response to a human corpse, the depressing details of what we actually learn about the dead man—put a damper on the cheery, sunny sheen of Ponsoldt's movie. That's partly the point, obviously, since the whole story is about the bittersweet transition from childhood innocence to a less-childish understanding of the world (A penultimate moment has them burying toys and trinkets), but something's off in that regard.

These girls are already pretty knowing about the darker and more complicated ways of the world, even if their knowledge only comes from TV and the internet. In framing this as a mostly allegorical coming-of-age tale, though, Ponsoldt evades the seemingly important questions of a society and culture that makes such knowledge common and unavoidable. Summering, then, is more discomforting than thoughtful in the way it dances around the uncomfortable truths it weaves into its characters and story.

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