Premise: A high school girl at a Catholic high school in 2000 starts to question both her understanding of sexuality and religion when she goes on her Junior retreat.
I really really liked this movie even though certain aspects annoyed me to no end. You see, I too went to a Catholic high school in a "flyover state" in the early 2000s and went on a Junior retreat with a similar 4-day structure. Let's just say this triggered a lot of memories.
The biggest strength of this movie is how keenly observed it is. It's obvious that writer/director Karen Maine grew up in the Midwest and went on a Catholic retreat like this. If she wasn't born between 1982 and 1984, I'd be shocked. She captures all the awkwardness of things like talking to priests and confessing sins to them. I love when Alice (Natalie Dyer) is in her small group and makes up something traumatic in her life to this group of classmates she barely knows (I recognized that hard). Even the way the internet is used is spot on: asking questions in random AOL chatrooms and panicking over every sound you hear from another room because you think your parents will catch you. I don't know how this movie plays to people not born sometime in the 80s, but it sure captured a moment for me.
The humor mostly worked for me. I was hoping for something a little more pointed like Saved. This mostly has fun with people not knowing what they're talking about, like Alice's inability to find out what "tossed the salad" means. There's all the virtue signaling, which I somewhat recall from high school as well. And the message of the movie is great. It's not so much saying that all religion is dumb. Instead, it's a reminder that no one has all the answers and you should interrogate the rules you are told rather than blindly accept them.
The things that annoyed me about the movie come down to me being a little too close to it. I don't know Karen Maine's exact situation growing up and I did have my Junior retreat in 2004, when the internet was more accessible than in 2000, but this all felt annoyingly exaggerated. My Catholic high school in Kentucky was nowhere near that repressed. Did kids really get that much savvier in 4 years? I remember at my own retreat treating my atheism like some dangerous secret I was keeping, but I also remember most students rolling their eyes at the "Live the Fourth" stuff a week later.
Then there's the line from the movie that pissed me off. After Alice runs away from the retreat and finds herself at a lesbian bar nearby, the owner has a talk with her before taking her back to the camp. As she's leaving, she asks Alice where she's planning to go to school. Alice tells her she's probably going to "State". The bar owner then suggests she should look for schools on the East or West coast to get away from this stuff. I'm sorry, but that's just dumb as shit. The state school is not a fucking bible college just because it's not on a coast. That is so lazy. Why couldn't it have been that Alice tells her she's looking at some Private Catholic college and the bar owner tells her to look at some state schools? Or why couldn't the advice have been to look for something out of state to get a little further away from home? The east or west coast school advice is lazy writing. I wish more movies would stop it with this idea that tolerant and intolerant people are in geographically distinct locations. After all, there is a fucking lesbian bar just a couple miles from where this Catholic retreat is taking place.
But again, overall a good movie. Just a couple bugaboos that really got to me.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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