Final Rating: 2.5/5
At times, Miguel Llansó’s Infinite Summer is a character study, a conspiracy thriller, a wistful teen comedy, and a buddy cop comedy. More than anything, it’s an ambitious film. But despite good performances and some interesting ideas, it’s a film which never comes together.
Summer centres around Mia (Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock), a young Estonian woman in the summer after her final year at high school. On a dating app, Mia meets “mindfulness guru” Dr. Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies) who gives her a respirator and mindfulness app. While Mia doesn’t initially take to it, young adults around her quickly do, as Interpol agents hone in on the Dr. Before long, Mia finds herself adjacent to an international drug trade revolving around an app that’s much more dangerous than it at first appears.
Summer is strongest when Mia is in the forefront. She is introduced as a guide at the Tallin Zoo, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about biology. In later conversations, she expresses excitement about gardens in Italy that she’s been getting ready to visit. While her passion about various subjects makes her a delight for the audience, it only bores her peers, who consistently interrupt her to talk about more important things like upcoming parties, concerts, or whether she wants a beer.
When even a potential love interest cuts her off to ask unrelated questions, Mia’s frustration is palpable. Kaljuvee-O’Brock communicates Mia’s constant disappointment and insecurity well. Even alone, Mia is uncertain about her future, and so ignored by her peers that her story is quickly established as a very lonely one.
There’s a sci-fi aspect to Summer as well, and once Dr. Mindfulness and his illicit drugs enter the picture, the film pivots sharply. Dr. Mindfulness works for a mysterious entity called Eleusia, which either manufactures or manifests as a substance that provides its users with ecstatic, hallucinatory trips. When used too often, or improperly, or just unluckily, Eleusia leaves behind a thick, opaque gas, as well as a sense of abandon and recklessness. In extreme cases, Eleusia can even turn its users into a thick, opaque gas.
If that sounds non-specific or confusing, it’s because it is. Summer is cagey with the details of Eleusia, and the drug allegory, while clear, isn’t particularly insightful. Illicit drugs can certainly ruin lives, alienate people from their friends, and leave a mark that may not be fully clear at first. This drug, specifically, is too confusing and non-specific to provoke anything other than head scratching. Most disappointingly, it draws much of the focus from Mia, who remains the main character, but whose journey takes a backseat to investigation of a poorly-defined international drug trade.
Summer sets the stage for an interesting exploration of what it’s like to be a teenager being actively deprived of your “last summer.” But once that stage is set, Llansó instead chooses to explore an admittedly interesting but underbaked secondary story, and the film doesn’t manage to recover.
Thank you to Justin Cook PR for the screener.
