Four teenage friends come together for an epic celebration before a wedding. The next day, they awaken, unable to remember the events of the previous night. And they’re missing a major member of the wedding party.
No, I’m not talking about the plot of The Hangover, I’m talking about Disney+’s The Slumber Party.
When Megan wakes up after a night of hypnosis-induced revelry, she notices three things. One, she’s missing an eyebrow. Two, she’s wearing her crush’s skull hoodie. And, three, her best friend, whose dad is getting married in just a few hours, is gone.
Anna Maria didn’t want to attend her dad’s wedding—she still hasn’t accepted that her parents have split up. But she wouldn’t just run away without even taking her phone.
Megan, her other best friend, Paige, and Anna Maria’s soon-to-be stepsister, Veronica, set out to find their memories and find their friend before any adults realize that something is wrong.
Anna Maria exhibits a lot of “teen angst.” She gets into an argument with her parents about attending her dad’s wedding (which is on her birthday) and calls her new stepmother an unkind name. However, Anna Maria feels badly for how she treats her dad. She realizes that she loves him and wants him to be happy, and they reconcile.
Anna Maria is incredibly mean to Veronica at first. However, her friends rightly call her out for this rude behavior. Eventually, all three of these teen girls welcome Veronica into their friend group.
Megan and her friends learn the importance of trying new things and supporting each other when those things get scary. And Megan’s bravery inspires a new friend to try something he’s scared of as well.
In some good parenting examples, Megan isn’t allowed to have a smart phone because her parents don’t want her to get a screen addiction (though she’s a bit humiliated by the “dumb phone” they do allow her to have). Similarly, Paige’s younger sister isn’t allowed to have a social media account because she’s too young (although her mom does let her have a smart phone).
Veronica hires a guy named Mesmer, a hypnotist, to entertain at Anna Maria’s party. The hypnotism works very effectively, and the girls are unable to remember the events of the night until Mesmer says the trigger word.
One girl brings a Ouija board to the slumber party.
As I mentioned before, Anna Maria’s parents are divorced. And the reason her dad is getting married on her birthday is because the venue had no other dates available before his new bride gives birth to their child. (Veronica states that they’re “all over each other.”) We also hear Anna Maria’s mom say that even though she doesn’t want to be married to Anna Maria’s dad anymore, she’s also not entirely prepared for him to get remarried.
Megan has two dads, and she’s never met her biological mother. (We hear a story about how a substitute teacher, unaware of these facts, made her write a Mother’s Day card.) Paige says her mom has been married “three or four times.” And it can be surmised that Veronica’s parents are divorced as well since her mom is marrying Anna Maria’s dad.
A video shows a girl twerking on a parade float and joking about “saving herself” for a school mascot. Another girl jokes that she might become someone’s sister and gyrates to make her point.
A teenage couple smooches. In another scene, they recreate the iconic “I’m flying” scene from Titanic. Several teens flirt.
A girl’s skirt gets caught in a car door and is ripped off when the vehicle drives away. She and her friend immediately cover her with a shirt, but we briefly see her underpants.
An adult man makes a sexist comment to a teen girl. Later, when one of her friends beats him in a food-eating contest, the winner yells, “I am your daddy!”
Veronica, who takes parkour lessons, leaps off a stage in an attempted stunt and lands flat on her face. Two of the teens jump off a speeding parade float, but the third is thrown from the top into a garbage bin (which she gets a bad scrape from) when it crashes. Someone falls down some stairs and nearly hurts herself. Veronica throws an onion which hits a character offscreen.
Someone worries that Anna Maria will become a Dateline victim. A girl threatens to kill a duckling. The teens use a blender to destroy some dolls as a form of torture to Anna Maria’s younger sister (whom they also tie up with jump ropes).
[Spoiler warning] In a credits scene, Paige accidentally punches Anna Maria in the nose, causing it to bleed heavily. This explains an earlier scene in which Paige had to wash blood off her hands not knowing how it got there. In another scene, Anna Maria has tampons in her nose to stop the bleeding.
God’s name is misused about 15 times. There’s a single use of “h—.” Someone exclaims, “What the duck?” And the s-word is cut off in one scene.
None.
The first thing Megan wants to do when she realizes Anna Maria is missing is to tell an adult. Paige discourages this since she believes they’ll all be in serious trouble if they do. However, as the story continues, the friends repeatedly ask each other when the right time to tell an adult is. They never do. And though things eventually work themselves out, it’s not a message parents necessarily want their children to learn (especially since a missing child is much, much more serious in many cases).
We hear that Paige’s brother, Mikey, created secret trapdoor out of his old middle school that students have been using for years to ditch school. He later helps the girls break into the high school. We also know they broke into the high school the previous night and stole a parade float from yet another high school.
While riding said parade float down a hill, Veronica gleefully shouts that they are breaking the law, since the float is going 26 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone. Two siblings break their parents’ rule about only driving siblings alone in the car.
People lie and are occasionally rude to each other. There’s a lot of blackmail. There are some mean implications about homeschooled kids.
We hear that Paige convinced a girl to cut off her own ponytail after she bullied Megan in second grade. We hear about a teenager who prank-called his grandmother and told her she won the lottery. There’s some mention of other pranks, and the girls eventually toilet-paper a neighbor’s house and “free” some baby ducks from their school’s science lab (though the animals didn’t appear to be in any danger).
It’s hardly surprising that the teens participate in so much bad behavior since they don’t have the best role models to look up to. Their principal admits to hiding asbestos from a building inspector. The girls joke about parents who participated in a college admissions scandal. And one of them thinks that all adults do is “ignore the climate crisis and waste their free time fighting in Facebook groups.”
Anna Maria’s mom buys her a pair of expensive shoes out of guilt over her divorce. Additionally, she remains completely unaware of her daughter’s activities, allowing Mesmer (a complete stranger) to hypnotize the girls, unsupervised. That then leads to the girls sneaking out, breaking the law and even injuring themselves.
We hear that a character passed gas so loudly that she woke herself up. Someone else does the same in another scene. It’s suspected that one of the girls wrote her name on a wall in fecal matter, but it turns out to be chocolate. A few people gag and someone vomits offscreen. A girl asks if a duck is “regular.”
A man makes a sexist comment to a teen girl.
[Spoiler Warning] In the end credits scene, Megan shaves off her eyebrow while her friends cheer her on.
In terms of plot, The Slumber Party is meant to be the tween girl version of The Hangover. In terms of content—at least relative to the R-rated film that perhaps inspired it—this story’s pretty tame. But there are still some things parents might want to be aware of, especially as it pertains to really unsafe behaviors.
Message-wise, the film focuses on the importance of trying new things instead of hating or fearing something without even giving it a shot. There’s also a strong emphasis on friendship and helping your friends during transitional periods of life.
Content-wise, the girls don’t lose their memory because they got blackout drunk. However, they do lose it due to hypnosis, a plot point and activity that some might frown upon.
There’s no harsh language, but God’s name is misused a number of times. And there are several close calls where bad words are either cut short or substituted with gentler terms.
The girls watch a video of Megan twerking on a parade hedgehog float, and Veronica later says Megan was “violating” the vehicle because of this. There’s some teenage flirting and one innocent smooch. But that’s about it aside from teasing one another about their crushes.
In addition to those content concerns, subtle messages about nontraditional families permeate the entire film. Anna Maria voices how upset she is that her father is getting remarried and having another child with his new bride. She just wants a “normal” family with “one mom and one dad and one annoying little sister.” This hurts Veronica, Anna Maria’s soon-to-be stepsister. Megan is also taken aback, since she has two gay dads and has never met her biological mother. And Paige gets upset as well since her own mom has been married “three or four times” and she’s the baby half-sister of her brood. The overarching meaning? Insisting on “traditional” family structure can feel hurtful to others.
And then there are two behavioral things that really rubbed me the wrong way. First, when Mesmer arrives to entertain at Anna Maria’s party, her mom just lets him walk into the basement with four teenage girls … completely unsupervised. She doesn’t know this man, and she wasn’t even the one who hired him—Veronica was. Then, she leaves the girls completely to their own devices the whole night long, allowing them to sneak out, break into not just one but two schools, TP a neighbor’s house, shave off one girl’s eyebrow and break another girl’s nose.
Second, I am so over the trope of, “Let’s not tell an adult that something is wrong or else we’ll get into trouble.” Yes, in this case and in the case of many other films, the kids eventually find a solution, and everything works out just fine. But a teenage girl was literally missing without a trace after a strange man had visited her house and hypnotized her and her friends. Someone should have told an adult. Because in the real world, that story doesn’t have a happy ending.
Some families might be willing to give The Slumber Party a shot, but others may well find that the messaging here is more than they’re willing to navigate at their kids’ own sleepovers.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
