★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

If the lack of summer fun in 2020 has you down, Summer of 85 is a great way to feel like you’ve had a French vacation without having left your house. The film is half-teenage-romance, half-mystery in a way that feels like Riverdale and Call Me By Your Name had a baby and sent it to France. Unlike Riverdale, this film has fewer soap opera tendencies and instead focuses on creating realistic, albeit questionably motivated, objectives for its characters. It’s like a story of summer lust recounted years later, the rose-coloured glow of youthful romance tinting events as extra nostalgic. A scene that plays to Rod Stewart’s Sailing particularly hammers home that feeling of a perfect summer night spent with friends, a picture-perfect memory of a time when life has yet to truly begin.

While Summer of 85 succeeds in its romantic plot-line, the dual timeline is jarring and doesn’t benefit either story. The mystery of whether or not Alex killed David distracts from the more valuable and interesting story of their romance. It feels like the film splits its time between the two genres to be interesting but instead ends up delivering half a film that is fantastic and half a film that leaves you wishing you could skip ahead.

Check out our (slightly more) in depth podcast review + rating below! Podcast music by Brian K.S. Cole.