Over/Under (2026)
I will admit to coming at Over/Under from a particular angle. I have a twelve year old daughter, and Sophia Silver's coming of age drama captures so much of what I see in her life right now, the shifting friendships, the first brushes with puberty, the endless negotiation of boys and bodies and belonging, that I was halfway won over before I had really thought about it as a film. Obviously I cannot speak to the experience of growing up as a girl, being a bloke myself, but the picture is observed with such care that it lands as a touching, recognisable story regardless.
It follows two best friends, Violet, played by Emajean Bullock, and Stella, played by Anastasia Veronica Lee, across a run of summers from the ages of nine to twelve. They live in different cities and reunite each year for a family holiday on the New England coast, and the film is essentially a series of those meetings, the girls a little older and a little more complicated each time. Bullock is the anchor of the piece and Lee gives Stella a lovely, quiet gravity, and the two of them are more than strong enough to carry the whole thing on their small shoulders.
What Silver does best is realism. There is nothing sensational or overcooked here, no melodrama, no tidy life lessons, just an attentive, unshowy honesty about how girls of this age actually are with one another. That grounded quality is the film's great strength, and it makes it genuinely watchable and often quite moving. It is also, I think, the very thing that holds it back. In chasing the truth of ordinary life, the film forgets to give you anything to remember it by. It is a lovely hour and a half in the company of two nice kids, and almost none of it stays with you once it is over.
Part of the trouble is that the harder material is kept at arm's length. Stella is quietly carrying the weight of her mother's cancer treatment, a genuinely heavy thing for a child to hold, and the film touches it only very lightly. Violet, meanwhile, is living through her parents' arguments, an absent father and a home that is quietly coming apart, and again the film brushes past it. These are exactly the pressures that should be shaping who these girls become between summers, and instead they sit in the background like weather, present but never really felt.
That points to the deeper issue, which is structural. If you build a film around two friends who only meet once a year, you need one of two things. Either the friendship itself has to be tested and the girls have to navigate real strain together, or the lives they lead while apart have to change them in ways that reshape each reunion. Over/Under does neither. The friendship sails along largely untroubled, its one real wobble arriving right at the end when one girl makes an offhand remark about the other's body, and the time apart passes without leaving much of a mark. What you are left watching, for long stretches, is two young kids simply being good friends and chatting, which is pleasant company but thin drama.
None of this is the cast's fault. The performances across the board are strong enough, the two young leads especially, and Silver clearly has a real eye and a real tenderness for this world. The drawback is the writing, a script that nails the texture of girlhood but forgets to give its characters a journey. Three and a half stars. I genuinely liked Over/Under, and as a father watching his own daughter live through this exact stretch of life I was often moved by it, but a little more courage with its own darker threads would have turned a very watchable film into a memorable one.
Reviewed from a screener provided by the distributor. Over/Under is available on digital platforms in the UK and Ireland now.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2020s: Look Back (2024), The Whale (2022), All That's Left of You (2025)
More drama: Something Pointless (2026), First Zone (2026), Home (2026)
