Sophie Jones

I was blown away by this film. The way it's made feels tender and delicate and personal. Everything here feels familiar and painful and dreamlike to anyone that's experienced the loss of the parent -- the internal desperation in loss, especially if you're a young person when you experience it, in trying to hold onto things and pushing them away by throwing your emotions into something else, searching for your memory in smells, talking outloud to them as if they're still there. Jessie's direction of the actors is fantastic and raw and real. And the intimacy of the characters' journeys feels so real and present. This is such a beautiful piece and I'll be thinking of it for some time.

This has all the trademarks of Hallmark -- lily white, clean and scrubbed, upper middle class, suburban softcore malaise.

In other words, it oozes what we now call white privilege and entitlement. Even in its faux teen messiness, it feels trivial in its woe-is-me preciousness.

What's missing, thankfully, is that whenever the teen daughters seem vulnerable, that the single parent does NOT feel obligated to try to give them a comforting Mr. Cleaver style lecture that mysteriously makes everything feel alright.

Nonetheless, in that way, this is still more like Wonder Years for modern teens in the Pacific North West. If this movie's purpose was to remind us of the vapidness of whiny self-absorbed suburban teen white girls and flat-affected suburban teen white boys, then mission accompished. This story reeks with so-what-ism.

I am hoping I can expect more of my three young ones than this disgraceful and dysfunctional display....... Really creepy to think this is a relationship representation......

I too found the lead Sophie Jones totally distasteful in the first few minutes of the film and this did not improve in fact worsened if anything......

There's a lot to admire here. The cast is uniformly excellent, especially the unknown young actors who genuinely look like high school students. And it's a handsome production despite what I'm guessing was a micro indie budget. The biggest problem I had with the film was Sophie herself (and Jessica Barr who plays her and is every bit as annoying as her screen personage). The character is a real pill, and I grew annoyed with her within the first 15 minutes. Accordingly, the 85-minute run time felt a lot longer. Maybe high school girls who see the film (will they even know it exists?) will have a different reaction. Overall it reminded me of an Eliza Hittman ("Never Rarely Sometimes Always") movie--esp Hittman's debut, "It Felt Like Love"--but not as good.

Grief can be very confusing and you just don't know how you will react until it happens. Losing someone as important as a mother during adolescent years would only make it more so. I think this is exactly how a teenage girl might react with the pressures of sex always there in those years added to the intensity of how the grief process can be. I especially like how Sophie's friends are such good support for her, staying with her while she works this out internally. This is probably not a film for a lot of people who may not understand what's going on. I will be interested to see further work this filmmaker does in future.