GRIFFIN IN SUMMER - Mark Reviews Movies

Griffin in Summer, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

Say what you will about his playwrighting skills, but Griffin (Everett Blunck) makes a strong first impression. Griffin in Summer opens at a high school talent show as the school year comes to an end, and this 14-year-old boy takes the stage to offer an excerpt of a play he's currently writing.

Writer/director Nicholas Colia's debut feature could have fallen into a couple of traps almost immediately, mainly by intentionally or accidentally making his protagonist, well, annoying. There's something endearing about Griffin, though. No one likely would say his play is going to be hitting Broadway or even the local community theater anytime soon. While part of the joke of Colia's screenplay is that this young teenager is writing about things that are beyond and probably inappropriate for his years, we gradually learn he has a good reason to know about and be interested in such matters, apart from what he knows of the history of modern drama.

Plus, the kid puts his all into this project, especially when he does take the stage in front of classmates who are not prepared or, probably, very interested in a scene from a domestic drama. Griffin plays the roles of both a husband, who may be having an affair with his assistant at work, and a wife, who has taken to drinking throughout the day to deal with how miserable her life has become—turning back and forth as he switches roles during an intense argument.

In the moment, he kind of transcends the cliché of the precocious kid and the gag that such things shouldn't be coming out of a barely teenage mouth. Griffin clearly knows what he wants to do, and he shows such passion for doing it that it's easy to like the kid.

Much of Colia's story, however, isn't about Griffin knows and wants. Instead, it's about the fact that, as confident as he may be when it comes to writing his plays and selling people on the idea that they're worth producing with his amateur means, he is still 14, unclear about a lot things, and uncertain of how he's supposed to fit in with other people.

He has a close group of friends, who have rehearsed and performed his shorter plays in the past, but early on in the film, his best friend and producer Kara (Abby Ryder Fortson) mentions that they should probably start the first rehearsal for his new show a bit later in the morning. After all, she's having friends over for a party.

Kara hasn't invited Griffin, not to be mean or because she doesn't want him there, but because she just assumes he wouldn't be interested, given that he's in the process of writing a play and figuring out the logistics of his most ambitious project to date. This hasn't been an issue in the past, it seems, but it is one now. Griffin doesn't even seem to understand how he feels about being left out of his best friend's plans.

The stuff that Griffin doesn't and can't comprehend keeps piling up here, too. There's his mother Helen (Melanie Lynskey), who's more distracted and less interested in her son's project than usual. Griffin knows that's because his father is out of town on business, so she has a lot of things to juggle around the house and with work at the moment. Overhearing a phone conversation between his mother and one of her friends, the kid also catches on to the fact that his parents' relationship is more strained and on the verge of collapse than he might have known.

Finally, there's the sudden appearance of Brad (Owen Teague), a 20-something young man whom Helen hires to do some handywork around the house. Griffin finds his presence and tendency to make a lot of noise while working to be irritating, but after discovering that Brad lived and was a performance artist in New York City until recently, the teen becomes very interested in him. Seeing him performing in a diaper in a video of his last piece and noticing his biceps make Griffin interested in the guy almost as much as for his artistic goals, too. The only obstacles are the significant age difference and that Brad has a girlfriend (played by an amusing Kathryn Newton).

From what we can tell, this very well might be Griffin's first, legitimate crush, and making matters more confusing for the kid, of course, is that, because of everything else the script has already established about the state of his other relationships, he's pretty much alone in trying to understand and work through it. His mother is, after all, going through her own domestic drama, as her marriage starts to reflect her son's play in a way that makes us think the teen has seen and heard a lot more than his parents know. His friends have made him feel like an outsider, especially since their plans mean he can't schedule as many rehearsals with them as he would like.

To be clear, the film is funny, because Griffin's oversized ambitions are inherently so, but Colia knows that all of his protagonist's eccentricities and efforts to appear mature stem from some budding pain and loneliness. Griffin in Summer makes us like this kid because the show he puts on for everyone, but we come to really like him because what's going on behind that façade is so recognizable and worthy of sympathy.

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