The ocean keeps giving Violet and Stella the same choice: go over the wave or dive beneath it. Sophia Silver returns to that childhood game across several New England summers, and the repetition becomes an elegant measure of everything the girls cannot keep fixed. Their bodies change. Their families destabilize. Their friendship, once apparently immune to time, develops its first shadows.
Silver, working from a screenplay co-written with Sianni Rosenstock and inspired by their friendship, follows Violet West and Stella Steinberg from nine to thirteen. Emajean Bullock and Anastasia Veronica Lee remain in the roles throughout, so the passage of time depends less on conspicuous physical transformation than on behavior. A shoulder stiffens. Eye contact disappears. Clothes become strategic. A joke suddenly has an audience beyond the person it might wound.
Early summers establish intimacy through repetition. Violet and Stella catch moths they imagine as fairy messengers, count backward to fall asleep and repeatedly attempt sleepovers that Stella cannot quite finish without calling home.
At the nudist beach, they spy from the dunes with a mixture of disgust and clinical fascination. Their horrified reaction to naked men is funny because Silver keeps the camera with the girls rather than exploiting what they see. The beach becomes their safest territory precisely because neither girl can control what awaits inland.
Bodies Become Evidence
Puberty enters the friendship first as information. Violet proudly displays her first underarm hairs. Tampons become mysterious objects requiring investigation. Adult bodies on the beach shift from comic curiosities into comparative material. Physical development begins producing a hierarchy neither girl has consciously agreed to.
The screenplay makes that transition painfully legible through Gaby, an older girl whose approval changes value across the years. Violet initially feels diminished beside her, suddenly conscious of her textured hair and clothes. Later, after straightening her hair, experimenting with makeup and becoming interested in boys, Violet earns Gaby’s attention. The exchange has a price.
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Silver stages one of the film’s sharpest scenes when Violet demonstrates kissing technique on her own hand before the girls meet two boys at the beach. Stella later follows the instructions with almost mathematical obedience, silently counting through the recommended intervals of tongue and no tongue. It is funny, awkward and faintly sad. Desire has arrived as another lesson Stella fears she is failing. Then Violet mocks Stella’s flat chest in front of Gaby.
The cruelty is ordinary. That makes it worse. Silver refuses melodramatic staging, and Anastasia Veronica Lee does not turn Stella’s response into a showcase of wounded acting. Her withdrawal is controlled, her face registering the discovery that the person who once provided refuge can now participate in the judgment coming from everywhere else. There is no villain here. Adolescence supplies its own lighting scheme.
Separate Lives, Unequal Summers
The months between reunions matter because Violet and Stella return carrying experiences the other did not witness. Violet goes back to Los Angeles, where girls at school target her birthmark, hair and appearance. When she reaches New England again with a sharper interest in fashion and boys, those changes carry the residue of having learned that presentation can function as armor.
Stella’s San Diego life appears socially calmer, yet fear has entered her home through her mother Rachel’s recurring breast cancer. Her father David also carries the burden of an unseen mother with dementia. Silver gives Stella a devastatingly plain acknowledgment of this erosion when she tells David, “I know mermaids aren’t real.” Childhood disappears here without ceremony. One sentence does the work.
Violet’s family fractures differently. Her devotion to her father Matt makes his increasing absences harder to ignore, while the tension between him and Sheryl eventually becomes the dreaded conversation in which Violet and her brother are told about the divorce.
These adult storylines are where the screenplay loses some of its precision. Rachel’s illness moves through recurrence and recovery with limited dramatic space, while Matt and Sheryl rarely acquire identities outside their failing marriage. Silver can make Violet showing an armpit hair feel consequential, yet a parental separation occasionally seems compressed into plot information. The imbalance is curious, though perhaps revealing: the film understands childhood from inside and adulthood mostly from the doorway.
Light Before Memory Hardens
Cinematographer Frances Chen gives the New England passages warmth without turning them into postcard nostalgia. The surf has brightness and movement, the girls’ early rituals inhabit softer spaces, and repeated trips into the water create a visual rhythm against which behavioral changes become easier to detect. The same beach can hold different children without physically changing.
That stability lets Silver work through accumulation rather than spectacle. The shared showers, discussions of tampons, inspections of body hair and surveillance of the nudist beach are filmed with remarkable composure. None becomes an invitation for embarrassment at the girls’ expense. The camera treats curiosity as curiosity.
Jackson Greenberg’s synth score works similarly, entering delicately around moments that could have been pushed toward sentimentality. Songs by The Japanese House extend the wistful atmosphere, particularly when summer begins feeling less like endless time and closer to a temporary arrangement.
Bullock and Lee remain the film’s decisive visual element. Bullock gradually alters Violet’s physical confidence, especially once makeup, straightened hair and male attention enter her social vocabulary. Lee moves Stella in the opposite direction, making hesitation increasingly deliberate rather than childish. Their performances make the years visible without requiring Silver to announce them. By thirteen, the girls can still stand beside the same water and recognize every old ritual. What has changed is the risk attached to choosing wrong.
Over/Under premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 30, 2022, and is available to watch on digital VOD platforms including Apple TV. Set in the summer of 2002, the coming-of-age drama tracks two nine-year-old best friends over several years as puberty, family dynamics, and growing up challenge the delicate bond of their childhood friendship.
Full Credits
Title: Over/Under
Distributor: Synchronicities, Bulldog Film Distribution
Release date: April 30, 2022
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes
Director: Sophia Silver
Writers: Sophia Silver, Sianni Rosenstock
Producers and Executive Producers: Sophia Silver, Grace West, Grace Gregory, Kimberly Hwang, Chelsea Davenport, Cooper Raiff
Cast: Emajean Bullock, Anastasia Veronica Lee, Adam David Thompson, Madeline Wise, Brandon Keener, Christiane Seidel, Valeria Cotto
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Frances Chen
Editors: Yu Jung Hou
Composer: Jackson Greenberg
The Review
Over/Under
Sophia Silver finds drama in the smallest fractures: Violet mocking Stella’s body for Gaby’s approval, Stella quietly counting through an awkward first kiss, a childhood wish giving way to the admission that mermaids were never real. Frances Chen’s warm summer photography keeps those changes suspended in remembered light, while Emajean Bullock and Anastasia Veronica Lee make four years of emotional distance legible through gesture and hesitation. The family subplots occasionally arrive too thinly drawn, yet the friendship remains painfully precise.
PROS
- Remarkably natural young performances
- Precise portrait of adolescent friendship
- Warm, expressive summer cinematography
- Puberty handled without sensationalism
- Sharp, intimate observational detail
CONS
- Cancer subplot feels abbreviated
- Violet’s parents lack dimension
- Some family conflicts feel underdeveloped
