For the man they find, time itself is done. Dead. Just like he is.
He lies in the dirt, still decked out in a coat and tie, flies floating above his bloating body. And while the corpse still tells its own sort of time tale—a time of gray decay—the man himself is beyond it. Who he was and what he did is frozen now: No more words to say or deeds to do. His mortal story is finished.
But what is that story? He’s not telling. The girls who cautiously search the corpse find no driver’s license, no credit cards, nothing that might hint at who he was. Only a pack of matches, hidden in his shoe, gives them the smallest of starting points—and it points to a nearby bar.
So the girls take a picture of the corpse (using filters so he doesn’t look quite so dead) and march right up to that bar—determined to find out who he was.
“Someone may be waiting for this guy to come home,” Daisy says.
Daisy’s 11 years old. Even at the dawn of this new quest, she and her friends—self-assured Dina, dreamy Lola, prim-and-proper Mari—are staring down another.
Seasons are changing. Fall is just around the corner. They’re clinging to the last days of summer. Clinging, in a way, to each other.
Middle school looms for all of them—a new age filled with locker rooms and passing periods; boys and bullies; changes and changes and more changes. Everything changes in middle school, they’ve been told—sometimes even your friends. However close you were in fifth grade, life conspires to pull you apart. They change. You change. Time is relentless. Remorseless.
And so for these fast friends, the body they found becomes the centerpiece of perhaps one last adventure together—one kept close and secret. Time stopped for this unknown man: Perhaps by piecing together his story, time will stop for them, as well.
But secrets like these can come with their own kinds of casualties, especially when you’re 11 years old. Outside of their investigations, the girls tell no one of what they’re up to, not even their mothers. And as they lie about who they’re with and what they’re doing, worried parents watch their phones and wonder.
Someone may be waiting for this unknown man to come home, just as Daisy says. But someone’s waiting for Daisy to come home, too.
Friendship forms the baseline of Summering’s bittersweet song. These four girls care deeply about one another, and you get the sense that they’ve been inseparable for far more than just this one summer. Friendship can be a truly wonderful thing. But people change, and none of them have any idea of what the future might bring. So they want to spend as much time together now as they can.
And these girls seem like pretty good kids, too. Dina’s as studious and motivated as they come. Mari goes to church every Sunday and wants to do right by her parents. Daisy, raised by a busy single mom, has taken on a lot of responsibility to make her mother’s life a little easier.
And while we all know that the girls should’ve gone straight to both the police and their parents when they first found the body, some seem to have, at least, understandable motives for what they do (even if their logic is a bit faulty). Daisy especially feels driven to give the man’s loved ones a bit of closure: After all, she knows what it’s like to have someone in one’s life vanish without any explanation. She feels that pain every day with the absence of her father. She’s determined to save another family that same pain.
‘Course, all the girls cause their own families a bit of pain. And while that’s certainly not a “positive,” it does allow us to see how much the moms here (dads, even when they’re in the picture, stay off the screen) care about their kids.
The crisis also helps one mom realize that she needs to make changes in how she interacts with her daughter. Still grieving over a failed relationship, this woman admits to the other moms that “I haven’t really paid attention to my daughter for a year.” She’s not a bad mom—just preoccupied with jobs and worries and sadness. But after the events of the movie, she seems determined to do better.
Summering comes with quite a few spiritual folds, so let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way.
Mari and her family are Catholic. We see her praying by her bed: “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death,” she recites. We also learn that she and her mother reliably go to Mass each week—but that her mom has granted her two opportunities to skip Mass during the summer. “I’ve only cashed in one,” she pleads, asking to use the second one to spend the weekend with her friends.
Lola’s name has a Catholic connection, too: She tells her friends that it means “lady of sorrows.” But her family leans more toward free-form spirituality than formal Christianity. When her mother paints a “portrait” of her (really, just a canvas full of colors), she worries because her aura seems off. Lola reads a book titled Magick and burns lavender in her room. (Her mom knows that when Lola does so, she’s upset about something.)
Lola also suggests that the best way to uncover this guy’s story is through a séance. The other three agree (some reluctantly). Lola pours sugar around them in the form of a circle—a magic barrier to keep whatever spirt they conjure at bay. (It’s supposed to be made of salt, she explains, but Lola figures sugar will work just as well.) They each give a sort of offering to burn in order to attract the spirit (including hair, medicine and, weirdly, a crucifix necklace). They hum to focus their concentration (which morphs into the tune of a popular playground chant). And when they believe the spirit of the man has come, the four ask questions of him—often about their own futures—and even make requests. (It appears that one of those requests is partially granted.)
If we can take what we see on screen as literal truth, the man’s spirit was already pretty active before the seance. We see the man—often partly obscured or through reflections in windows—“haunt” each of the girls in turn. While the film seems to suggest that these hauntings are more the result of the girls’ own freaked-out imaginations rather than real spectral appearances, one scene involves the shaking of a bathroom stall door.
The girls take part in their own quasi-religious rites. All are apparently big fans of the book The Bridge to Terabithia, and they’ve concocted their own version of the made-up land—paying their “respects” to it with offerings of “incense, myrrh and gum.” Later, the four bury many vestiges of their childhood in a somber ceremony.
Dina’s sister describes middle school as the “seventh pit of hell.” We see a picture of Mary and Jesus hanging on a wall.
Our four friends are mainly concerned with their mutual friendship, but you can see hints that some are developing other relational interests. Daisy and a boy on a bike exchange a lingering glance, and she tells us in narration mode that she sometimes worries that she’ll be the last to “kiss a boy.” Worried moms speculate that their girls’ strange behavior must be related to boys.
Dina’s sister, when warning Dina about the perils of middle school, says, “I’m not just talking training bras and body hair.” Dina tells her friends about a show she saw that began with a guy pressuring a girl to go home with him. How did it end? Read on.
Dina says that that particular TV episode culminated on the girl escaping, but not before she ate human remains and the police finding a basement full of dead bodies. “She should’ve been next,” Dina hisses.
Turns out that Dina watches a lot of violent crime procedurals, and for the most part has done so without her mom’s knowledge or approval. Those shows may have been a factor in the no-nonsense way she approaches the real corpse they come across—and her desire to investigate the “case” herself.
We see the corpse in question quite a bit, and the movie pulls no punches when it comes to the process of decay. (We see the gray skin and a bit of rot, and we hear the flies attracted to the corpse.) But neither does the film gratuitously examine that dead body, either. We never really see the man’s face, for instance—even as the girls prop the body up to take a picture of it.
The girls speculate as to whether the man was murdered or if he killed himself. (“I wonder if he suffered?” Lola asks.) One later learns that the bridge under which the body was found has a reputation as a “suicide bridge,” and many people apparently jumped from it during the Great Depression.
Daisy swipes a gun from her house and, later, fires it twice. A phone is run over. The “ghost” of the man can feel quite menacing.
“Mari’s kind of a prude,” her mom tells some other mothers. “She gets mad at me when I swear.” Fitting that, the movie keeps its own language largely in line, with one or two big exceptions.
As mentioned, the first clue to the dead man’s identity leads to a bar. The girls visit that bar and talk with the bartender (and a couple of regular drinkers—one of whom seems to be pretty toasted). One of the girls concocts a cover story on the spot: “We’re ghost hunters,” she says, “and we hear that this place is haunted.”
“Well, we gotta lot of spirits,” the barkeep says, gesturing to the bottles.
They learn that the dead man was an “occasional day drinker” who preferred “bottom shelf whisky.” Later, when they visit the place where the man apparently lived, the camera eyes what appears to be a marijuana joint.
The mothers drink wine as they talk about their girls. Dina takes some sort of medication. Her sister calls sugar “cocaine for 11-year-olds.”
Summering’s biggest issue is really the amount of lying the girls do to keep the dead body, and their activities, a secret.
They all make a pact not to tell their parents. But naturally, the lies begin to compound. They break into their old elementary school to do research on the computers there. (Mari has a phone, but her mom put some spyware on it, so they can’t look up the dead man there. “She’ll notice, and she’s super nosy.”) And when Mari’s worried mom discovers a few lies and calls her daughter, Dina takes the phone and flings it into the street—where it gets run over. Dina tells her to make up a story about what happened to her phone. When Mari protests that that’d be lying, Dina says, “You already lied. Just lie again.”
The dead body stinks, naturally. And when the girls move it, the corpse makes uncomfortable noises.
One of the girls talks about how her mom made her use the boys’ bathroom when the girls’ bathroom was very crowded. “There was pee everywhere,” she says, going into some dramatic detail as to just how much urine she saw. Another girl says that her brother once told her that there’s nothing quite as satisfying as urinating from somewhere high.
Lola tells her friends that her mom doesn’t believe in “deodorant and antiperspirant.” Dina says she doesn’t like skirts because they “make me feel like something’s going to fly up my butt.” They discuss that, whether they go backward or forward in time, they’ll still end up wearing diapers.
Superficially, you could call Summering sort of a Stand By Me for girls. Like the R-rated 1986 film, it involves four fast friends dealing with a dead body. And really, both films deal with a different sort of death: The passing of childhood.
Summering’s narrative isn’t nearly as crisp as that in Stand By Me. But the movie’s slower pace and gentler tone comes with its own advantages.
It’s a hard thing to grow up in this age of smartphones and patchwork morals; it’s harder still, perhaps, to parent in them. But in Summering, we see that girls—even girls who make mistakes—can grow up with values and priorities largely intact: Family. Friends. Future. Even a hint of faith.
But Summering, even with its wistful charms, still strays from the straight-and-narrow, just as its young protagonists do. The ghosts and seances, the girls’ sometimes crude sense of humor and their near-ubiquitous lying all make Summering a less-than-innocent cinematic escape.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
