lake bell

If Summering wanted to comment on youthful flightiness or detachment, that might be the point, but the film doesn’t embrace that ethos. Filmmaker James Ponsoldt has said he wanted to make an adventure in which his daughter could see herself and her friends, and while that’s laudable, Summering doesn’t work. The film doesn’t know how to balance the weight of death and thoughts about the passage of time with the carefree and fleeting innocence of childhood.

A quartet of pre-teen girls while away the dwindling days of summer before they start middle school when they make a shocking discovery in the woods. If that sounds a little bit like Rob Reiner’s 1986 classic drama Stand By Me, the bones of that Stephen King adaptation are definitely in this film’s DNA. But director James Ponsoldt and his co-writer Benjamin Percy take that outline in entirely different directions in this warm, thoroughly enjoyable story of kids on the cusp of big life changes going all in on one last grand adventure.