My Summer as a Goth – Review

Teenager Joey (Natalie Shershow) doesn’t have all that much going for her in life: she has a distant, career-obsessed mother, only one friend at school (and a group of rather unpleasant hangers-on), and she’s moody and joyless. All of these things are interconnected with the death of her father, at whose grave she spends most of her free time. So of course she’s going to be attracted to the Goth subculture, but it’s not something she discovers until, spending Summer with her permissive grandparents, she finds herself attracted to Victor (Jack Levis), the grandson of her grandparents’ neighbours/best friends. Victor makes his first appearance in the film pretending to hang himself, something Joey spies through his bedroom window, and rushes in to save him. What morbid teenager wouldn’t find that a turn-on?

Victor sets about remaking Joey in Goth fashion – curiously, she is perky and cheerful in Goth finery, while she was sour and dour in brighter colours. In time, Victor and Joey are spending all their time with one another, and Victor’s Goth friends Penn and Cobb, and a whole extended family of Goths, for that matter. It must be an odd town those grandparents of hers live in, for the more the film goes on, the more we get the impression that all there is to do around town is Goth stuff, especially since token punk Antonio (Eduardo Reyes) claims to hate Goths, yet spends all his time at their hangouts and club nights nonetheless. Joey seems to have an attraction to Antonio, who is decent and kind, unlike the increasingly controlling, distant, patronising and pretentious Victor. But is Joey mature enough to realise that? And what’s Antonio’s deal, anyway?

The fact is, teenagers – or teenagers of a certain type, anyway – tend to be attracted to pretension, condescension and aloofness, mistaking them for depth of character, self-confidence and integrity. Tara Johnson-Medinger’s sweet little film recognises the pitfalls, the awkward fumbles, the casual cruelties endured in the course of adolescent love, and gives us a believably misguided and sometimes shallow heroine – one who is all the more impossible not to relate to because of that. It ends not with “The Tragic Unveiling of Misguided Teenage Hearts”, but on a casual and, one hopes, realistic note of reconciliation.