Metacritic-Rezensionen

Despite the familiar settings and tropes in director Sammi Cohen’s debut feature film, Crush feels refreshingly contemporary.

Crush is, for better or worse, just like every other teen rom-com, extraordinary in its ordinariness. It succeeds at what it sets out to do: Give queer kids a totally enjoyable, and often quite funny, mainstream love story with a happy ending.

The movie’s aggressive hipness can be a turnoff at times. But once it settles down into a more typical coming-of-age story, Crush becomes disarmingly sweet and relatable.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the filmmakers hope, that you’ll be so swept up in “representation” that you won’t notice how generic the story is, and how dull and drab and laugh-starved its execution turns out to be.

It is clear from the offset which sibling will win both Paige’s affection and the obligatory climactic smooch. The journey there can drag. More fresh is the movie’s sex-positive empathy.

Hulu’s Crush is a queer coming-of-age movie in which very little happens, and whose characters barely exist outside of their joking lines of dialogue. Its young actors are a delight, but even as a story of teenage crushes, it rarely captures what it feels like to be young and in love.

What’s jarring in Crush is the absence of some requisite dose of youthful mischief, a sense of stakes and perhaps even a lightly scandalous touch, integral to the spirit of many of the genre staples Cohen and co-writers Kirsten King and Casey Rackham attempt to revive on their own terms.