THE SHORT GAME (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Short Game, Abramorama

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

Everything about The Short Game returns to the game of golf. Every conflict and character development and even potential or actual tragedy in this movie comes back to the sport and, especially, how our protagonist can be better at it. There's a significant death about midway through the story, and even that, somehow, relates to yet another lesson the main character can learn about the sport he loves. The minister's eulogy might as well be addressed directly to Jeremy (Ben Krieger), and actually, the way the scene is shot by co-writer/director Frank Sanza makes us think it literally is for our protagonist alone.

There are other examples of the movie's strange priorities and inability to perceive its characters as having any purpose outside of golf or, more to the point, Jeremy's ability to play the game. One is the other major character to the plot. He's Jeremy's younger brother Ethan (Owen Himfar), who has autism. Jeremy struggles to connect with his brother, mainly because he's so busy trying to get to and win a state championship.

It's also, though, because the teen sees his younger sibling as an obstacle to his potential success. There are several scenes here in which Jeremy is told by multiple people that he has to consider the wants, needs, and feelings of other people, which might be a good lesson for the guy to learn. Instead, Ethan and Jeremy only connect when the older brother realizes how much his younger sibling admires him and how his condition makes Ethan an expert in golf strategy.

Beyond the fact that this development falls in line with a questionable stereotype about people with autism, it stands counter to whatever story the filmmakers here seem to think they're telling. Jeremy remains the same character he is at the start throughout the movie. It's only the circumstances surrounding him that really change, and anything that might have led to him growing and seeing things and people beyond golf or himself is either downplayed or conveniently forgotten.

Essentially, the screenplay, created by five writers, has all the trappings of a feel-good underdog sports story, but it doesn't do the basic work of constructing or telling its story in a way that makes us actually feel good about what we're watching. It's cheesy and hokey and manipulative in its melodramatic beats. Since the story only has a lot of clichéd situations and characters and developments to offer, the whole movie comes across that way.

None of it feels authentic, to be sure. The teens, including Jeremy's best friends Tommy (Tyler Lofton) and Carly (Emma Pars), don't in their awkward dialogue, which sounds like what adults assume teenagers sound like after taking in a cultural diet of decades-old TV sitcoms. Just like every other character in the story, Jeremy's friends exist only within the context of their relationship to him, from Tommy going out of his way—even in a metaphysical sense, eventually—in helping his pal improve his short game to Carly making a documentary about Jeremy's last year as a high school golfer.

Jeremy wants a golf scholarship to college, by the way. He's certain that winning the state championship will get him one, so he becomes obsessed, despite the financial and health challenges of his family—including parents, played by Mackenzie Astin and Katherine Cunningham, who are trying to pay off lots of bills because Jeremy's mother recently went through treatment for cancer. One would imagine that might have had a significant impact on the teen, but the movie lives in an odd bubble in which only immediate situations matter. Sure, the mother had cancer, but what is her existence doing for Jeremy lately?

Bluntly, he's a selfish, unsympathetic kid, and the fact that the movie recognizes it but works around addressing it in any meaningful way does him no favors, either. That aforementioned death, which is only a momentary setback for Jeremy before he goes right back to focusing entirely on golf, is easily the most egregious example, but when every obstacle is only temporary and luck plays a big part of overcoming some of them, how can a character learn anything?

As for the actual sports story, it's mostly the usual stuff, complete with a villainous opponent and characters offering commentary about the stakes of the match. The Short Game looks the part of an uplifting sports drama, right down to what could have been a fine final shot of our protagonist, perfectly framed on a golf course against the setting sun. Keeping in the spirit of the rest of the movie, though, it ruins that last moment, too.

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