87 min | PG-13 | August 12, 2022 | Bleecker Street
Four girls find a dead body in the woods on the last weekend before middle school. They decide to handle it themselves rather than tell their parents. The dead man stays a prop, and so does everything else.
Four girls spend their final days of summer together before middle school splits them into new schedules and new selves. They wander into the woods near a railroad trestle and find the body of a man none of them recognizes. Instead of calling the police, they investigate the death on their own. James Ponsoldt frames this as a story about the last summer of childhood and the fear of growing apart. The film wants the corpse to be a mirror for the girls’ anxieties about change. It never decides whether it is a mystery, a memory piece, or a fable, and that indecision hollows out the center.
Lia Barnett plays Daisy as the watchful narrator who feels the group fracturing before the others do. She carries the most interior work and grounds the scenes that drift toward whimsy. Madalen Mills plays Dina with a sharper, more confrontational energy that the script underuses. Eden Grace Redfield and Sanai Victoria fill out the quartet as Mari and Lola, but the writing hands them traits instead of inner lives. Lake Bell, Megan Mullally, and Ashley Madekwe appear as the mothers in scenes that exist to worry and then retreat. The young leads commit, and the adults are wasted.
Ponsoldt directs from a script he wrote with Benjamin Percy, and the seams between their instincts show. Percy writes horror, and the film keeps reaching for an eerie register it then apologizes for. The cinematography bathes the woods in soft golden light that signals nostalgia in every frame and flattens the menace the plot keeps promising. A recurring magical-realist device involving the dead man’s wristwatch tries to inject mystery and instead underlines how little the story commits to its own rules. The score swells to tell the audience when a moment matters because the scenes do not earn that weight on their own.
The comparison to better versions of this story is unavoidable and unkind. This is a coming-of-age film that gestures at mortality without confronting it and at grief without depicting it. The girls solve nothing and learn nothing the audience can name. Ponsoldt has made specific, lived-in films about people on the edge of change before, and the talent for observation is buried here under sentiment. The result is gentle, well-meaning, and forgettable.