My First Summer (2020)
★★ — My First Summer (2020)
There's a version of My First Summer that I think I would have loved. You can see it flickering around the edges of every frame: the Australian bush bathed in that extraordinary golden light, gum trees catching the afternoon sun, misty mornings hanging low over the lake. Director Katie Found clearly has a remarkable eye, and on a purely visual level this is a genuinely lovely piece of work. Close-ups linger on freckles, hesitant glances, the quiet texture of young faces learning to trust. The soundtrack is delicate, unshowy, and the whole thing carries itself with a kind of luminous restraint. I wanted to fall into it.
But a beautiful surface is only as interesting as what lies beneath it, and here the depths are frustratingly shallow. The story creaks and strains from the very first act. A teenage girl witnesses a suicide. She then encounters the deceased's daughter, a girl who has apparently spent her entire life in complete seclusion, unknown to neighbours, to local authorities, to anyone who might have noticed a child living off the grid. Fine, I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the right film. Except My First Summer doesn't earn that suspension. It just asks for it and moves on.
What really pulled me out of it was the emotional register. This is a girl who has just watched her mother die. The grief should be enormous, strange, destabilising. Instead, within hours she's sharing baths and meals and whispered confidences with a complete stranger, warm and curious and almost casually affectionate. I kept waiting for the film to acknowledge the wrongness of that, to use the dissonance deliberately. It never does. The script seems to have mistaken a sort of dreamy blankness for depth, as though withholding feeling is the same as exploring it.
I've seen other films handle this territory far more honestly. You Won't Be Alone also centres a young woman isolated from the world and navigating intimacy and identity in an almost primal landscape, and it earns every strange beat because it commits fully to its logic. My First Summer wants the poetry without doing the harder emotional work underneath.
The two lead actresses are doing genuinely good work, to be fair to them. They bring warmth and a real physical ease to their scenes together, and there are moments where the connection between them feels authentic and tender. But they're working against a script that gives them almost nothing to push against. Silence is used repeatedly as a substitute for meaning, awkwardness passed off as authenticity, physical isolation treated as though it automatically generates emotional intimacy. It doesn't. Proximity isn't the same as closeness, and atmosphere isn't the same as substance.
Films like Mustang show what's possible when you place young women at the centre of a coming-of-age story and genuinely reckon with the pressures and grief and longing that shape them. That film had beauty too, but it was beauty in service of something urgent and real. Here I felt the urgency was mostly aesthetic, a lovely frame around a hollow middle.
There's enough here that I wouldn't write Katie Found off as a filmmaker. The visual instincts are real, and I'd be curious to see what she does with a stronger script. But My First Summer mistakes mood for meaning one too many times, and by the final act I'd stopped being moved and started being mildly frustrated. The intentions are genuinely tender. The execution is fatally off-key.
Two stars.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2026-04-05
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: BFI Player · BFI Player Amazon Channel · BFI Player Apple TV Channel
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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