Director: Sophia Silver
Writer: Sophia Silver, Sianni Rosenstock
Stars: Emajean Bullock, Anastasia Victoria Lee, Adam David Thompson
Synopsis: Over/Under is a coming-of-age story that shows the pain of slipping out of sync from your childhood best friends.
I’m such a sucker for coming-of-age stories, especially ones that explore girlhood with all its awkwardness, tenderness, curiosity, and contradictions. There’s something about watching young girls slowly realize that childhood doesn’t last forever that gets me every time, and Over/Under completely understands that feeling. It’s a warm, beautiful, quietly heartbreaking little film that feels like looking back on a summer you didn’t realize would be the last one before everything changed.
Sophia Silver’s film follows Violet and Stella, two best friends who spend their summers together, running around, playing in the water, making wishes, and finding little ways to make the world feel magical. Their friendship is the center of the film, and I loved how natural it feels. They aren’t constantly explaining how much they mean to each other; they simply exist together. They joke, explore, get annoyed with each other, make up, and share the kind of tiny secrets that feel enormously important when you’re a kid.
There’s such a lovely sense of freedom in these early scenes. The summer setting gives Over/Under this dreamy, sun-soaked atmosphere, but there’s always a little sadness underneath it because we know these girls are growing up. Every day feels endless when you’re young, yet somehow the years disappear before you realize they’re gone.
As Violet and Stella get older, that innocence begins to shift. They become more aware of their bodies, their appearances, popularity, boys, and the expectations that seem to suddenly come with being a girl. What I appreciated most is that Silver doesn’t turn these experiences into big dramatic milestones. Instead, they’re presented as small, sometimes funny and sometimes uncomfortable moments that gradually add up.
A different haircut can suddenly make you feel like a completely different person. Wearing makeup can feel like stepping into an entirely new version of yourself. Suddenly noticing things about your body that you never thought about before can be exciting, confusing, embarrassing, or all three at once. Over/Under understands that girlhood is often made up of these tiny moments that seem insignificant to everyone else but can feel monumental when you’re living through them.
The film also gives both girls lives outside of their friendship, and that adds a lot of emotional depth. Violet struggles with bullying and feeling like she doesn’t fit into the version of femininity everyone around her seems to expect. Stella is dealing with serious problems within her own family, forcing her to confront parts of adulthood far earlier than she should have to. Their friendship becomes a kind of refuge, but even that begins to change as they grow older.
I especially loved that Over/Under never feels like it’s judging these girls for wanting to grow up. There’s no easy message about how childhood is pure and adolescence is somehow corrupting it. Instead, the film recognizes that growing up can be exciting and frightening at the same time. You can desperately want to be older while simultaneously wishing you could stay exactly where you are.
Emajean Bullock and Anastasia Veronica Lee are fantastic, bringing an incredible naturalism to their performances. Their friendship feels lived-in rather than scripted, and so many of their interactions have the messy spontaneity of real childhood friendships. That authenticity is what keeps the film from becoming overly sentimental.
And honestly, I adored the atmosphere. There’s something gorgeous about the way this movie captures summer—the sunlight, the water, the warmth, the feeling that the season could last forever. It has that slightly hazy quality of a childhood memory, where you remember the feeling of a place more vividly than the actual details. It made me nostalgic for a childhood I wasn’t even necessarily experiencing alongside these characters.
Over/Under isn’t trying to reinvent the coming-of-age genre, and it doesn’t need to. Its strength comes from how intimate and observant it is. It understands that growing up rarely happens in one huge, defining moment. It happens quietly, through hundreds of little changes that you barely notice until you look back and realize just how far you’ve come.
Tender, funny, gorgeous, and a little bittersweet, Over/Under is exactly the kind of small indie coming-of-age film I’m always hoping to discover. It captures that strange space between being a kid and becoming someone new, and I found myself completely charmed by it.
