almost adults

Film, 2016, 3 stars

Directed: Sarah Rotella
Written: Adrianna DiLonardo

OK Carmilla fans, please don’t hate me. I’m one too, OK? Seriously, this is not my fault.

Almost Adults is utterly inoffensive on every level. It’s middle of the road, essentially a platonic love story between two best friends, one of whom happens to be queer. Unfortunately, that does also equate to being a bit on the boring side. You have no idea how much it kills me to say that about anything starring Elise Bauman.

Mackenzie “Mac” (Bauman) is struggling in a weirdly non-struggling way with being gay. She’s known it for a while, it’s just that suddenly spring is busting out all over with her hormones and she wants to get laid, so that means admitting this mildly irritating condition to the world, particularly to her best friend Cassie (Natasha Negovanlis).

I swear, it’s like Mac has a weird rash or something rather than "the gay", so intensely does she screw up her face every time she talks about it, particularly to her annoyingly accepting parents. She is, however, openly watching lesbian porn and softball games in her loungeroom in a weird, passive aggressive coming out exercise. (This filmmaker definitely watched But I’m a Cheerleader as a youngster, the tropes are here, just not as funny unfortunately).

Mac proceeds to tell pretty much everyone else except Cassie that she’s gay, and manages to pick up a new soccer-playing girlfriend while discovering Tumblr and chatting up women. Apparently the reason for this is that she’s afraid of Cassie’s reaction, though it could also be because Cassie has recently broken up with her on again, off again boyfriend and is declaring how miserable she is to everyone who will listen.

The film really tries hard to be funny, the problem is all the attempts are disastrously awkward. Working against any hope of connecting with the audience in any meaningful way is the main and supporting cast. Mac has two faces she uses interchangeably, either naively bewildered, or comically outraged. There doesn’t seem to be anything in between. Cassie just seems alternately pissed or miserable.

Trying his best to salvage the whole thing is Mac’s gayboy friend Levi (Justin Gerhard), but the poor man has been cast in what I call the “Translator” role. His entire presence appears to be to explain queer culture for the benefit of the straight audience who might not be quite getting the in-jokes, all under the guise of explaining it to a clueless Mac. We even have a cringey scene where Levi and Mac test her gaydar on campus. I’m pretty sure we saw this joke in season 1 of The L Word, and it didn’t work there either.

Almost Adults feels like an early 90s film escaped and started to run amok in our time, something it shares with films like Jenny’s Wedding. It’s really bland in 2016, and tame to the point of irrelevance. There are important messages about love, coming out, and trust between friends being explored here, only the way they’re approached is so old school I’m surprised someone isn’t wearing pink neon leggings.

I think this will run successfully on cable TV and comes across like what my American friends used to call an "after school special". It will gain cult status amongst the Carmilla fandom, and nab a fan or two from the crowd that like any film featuring two women kissing they can find on Netflix.

I hate to say it, but this concept has been done so much better before, and really didn’t need to be done again.