AN AUTUMN SUMMER **1/2
Jared Isaac2025
IDEA: Alongside family and friends, teen couple Kevin and Cody spend the summer together in Michigan before they have to part for college.
BLURB: For all its familiarity or triteness as yet another bittersweet summer-before-college story, An Autumn Summer is a pretty wonderful evocation of the latter titular season. Isaac and DP Brandon Somerhalder capture a Michigan summer by the lake with a loving eye and palpable sense for the pleasures of long, idle days. They convey as much blissful warmth through sun-soaked frolics in the sand as they do in cozy story-times tucked away inside a cabin, both aglow in gold and amber hues. One particular shot, a languid six-minute dolly across the beach at sunrise, is simply magical, the low sun casting a pastel haze over the young lovers and their cheerful friends. The chemistry and esprit de corps between these actors — and particularly between leads Mark McKenna and Lukita Maxwell — is so believable, lived-in, and passionate it’s easy to look past the fairly thin characterizations, or the curious casting of a man pushing 30 as an 18-year-old. Mood can go a long way in carrying a film, and An Autumn Summer sustains its buzzy estival vibes for most of its runtime, at least until the inevitable parting of its teen lovebirds brings the lurking melancholy to the fore. At this point, the film arrives at exactly where you knew it would, but it doesn’t make the preceding soft, genial summertime amble any less pleasing.
