If movies have taught us anything it’s that childhood is a magical time where, if you’re doing it right, you befriend space aliens, rescue orcas, inherit chocolate factories or play every sport imaginable with an omni-talented Olympian dog.
Or, if you’re more of the melancholic type, at least you find a dead body in the woods. That’s the bare minimum anyone can ask for.
James Ponsoldt’s “Summering” is a direct descendant of “Stand By Me,” films about youngsters peppered with wispy nostalgia, in which the innocence of their youth is challenged by a corpse tucked away where only children are likely to find it. But whereas Rob Reiner’s classic coming-of-age film romanticized a decades-bygone era, Ponsoldt finds the same magically complicated mash-up of naiveté and depth in a contemporary setting. Childhood, he seems to argue, is always magical and horrifying in equal measure, no matter when you’re stuck there.
The film tells the story of four young friends on the last days of summer, just before they begin their grueling journey through middle school. Lia Barnett plays Daisy, whose father is nowhere to be found and whose mother (played by Lake Bell) emotionally checked out of the family a year ago. Dina (Magdalen Mills, “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey”) is the group’s intellectual and natural leader. Lola (Sanai Victoria, “Diary of a Future President”) still believes in the supernatural, and Mari (Eden Grace Redfield, “Our Flag Means Death”), who still looks younger than her friends despite being older than some of them, rounds out the quartet.
As they walk to their favorite isolated spot — which they call “Terabithia” without a trace of self-aware foreshadowing — they ponder the big questions about life, their future, and time travel. And when they find the dead body of a middle-aged man where their waning nostalgia should be, they decide to do something about it. They’ve seen “Law & Order” — or at least, some of them have — and they’re going to solve the mystery of who this man was, and how he got here.
That they are young children with zero forensic experience is not lost on them, nor on screenwriters Ponsoldt and Benjamin Percy. The girls of “Summering” are not precocious pre-teen sleuths with mad skills in the detecting department, but they can put two and two together and unearth a few broad strokes of this very sad man’s life. Along the way, they enter their first tavern but mostly get distracted by the retro arcade games in the corner. They break into their old school to use the internet search engines but can’t help doodling on the dry erase boards while they’re at it.
Meanwhile, the ghost of the dead man follows them around, scaring them witless, and paintings of trees in the background suddenly lose their colorful leaves. “Summering” may have a streak of plausibility in the natural, seemingly effortless performances of the young stars, all of whom are remarkable, but the film isn’t literal. It’s nostalgic for a time that currently exists, and mourning the end of an era that isn’t quite gone yet. James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now”) keeps his film permanently trapped in a liminal space between childhood and adolescence, where magic is real but intangible and largely metaphoric.
“Summering” can’t help but come across as somewhat eternal. Aside from a few pieces of modern technology, and a few mentions of decades-old crime shows, Ponsoldt’s film has almost no interest in timeliness or generational specificity. The soundtrack isn’t a litany of Top 10 hits from that particular summer, and this wonderful quartet of friends is infinitely more interested in talking about themselves and each other than whatever is trending on social media that day.
It’s possible that Ponsoldt is making a bit of a statement with “Summering,” that these children who aren’t beholden to online living are living their best (or at least most fascinating) lives. But the film is devoid of meaningful contrast with characters who do live online. Instead that contrast is between the girls and their mothers, who are living largely alone, happy to varying degrees but lacking their own social lives. As they begin to realize their daughters are missing, they form connections that might lead to a closeness only their children seem to enjoy, a plot point that could perhaps have been more richly explored but comes across regardless.
Greta Zozula (“The Half of It”) supplies the dreamy, sun-dappled cinematography, exquisitely grounding the fantasy and fantasizing the mundane. While many of the film’s visuals do little to call attention to themselves, Ponsoldt and Zozula choose key moments to prove that they do, indeed, know how to create potent imagery and use it to key effect, after we’ve gotten used to the seasonal haze.
“Summering” may not fully satisfy in the plot department — not every mystery gets resolved — but the story certainly does. As the film progresses, it becomes abundantly clear that this isn’t a tale about a dead body; it’s about a flashpoint, a weekend that will always be remembered, if not necessarily 100% accurately, by everybody involved. A formative moment that’s frozen forever, captured on celluloid, full of promise and melancholy, lovely and scary, universal and specific, forever but never.
“Summering” opens in US theaters August 12.