Paige (Rowan Blanchard) has had a crush on popular girl Gabby (Isabella Ferreira) for years.
When she joins the track team, she has the opportunity to finally get close to her.
Until she is paired off to train with Gabby's sister, AJ (Auliʻi Cravalho)...
I am a fan of brevity in movies - particularly nowadays when so many movies feel at least half an hour too long. In the case of Crush, it feels a little too brief.
Crush takes the template of a high school romantic comedy and centres around queer girls navigating the pirfalls of crushes, awkward meet cutes and misconstrued intentions.
Teen movies about LGBT+ characters falling in love have been made before. I am no expert - from memory, the only one I have seen is Maria Maggenti’s The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995) - but it is nice to see a queer romcom get released on a big platform.
One of the best things about it is that it’s queerness is matter-of-fact and the characters face no obstacles based on bigotry. It is a subtle aspect of the storyworld, but refreshing.
It also inverts the familiar trope from other romcoms where the main character’s support system is a sympathetic but two-dimensional queer character. Instead, Paige has a straight best friend (Tyler Alvarez) who is comically infatuated with his girlfriend (Teala Dunn).
Aside from a few touches like this, in terms of its narrative, Crush is familiar. It feels like the filmmakers are aiming for a universal romance.
It is a worthy intention, but Crush’s familiar story moves so quickly through its key points that I left feeling like something was missing.
The characters are likeably portrayed and have great chemistry - but they never felt that fleshed out as characters. Backgrounds and personal issues pop up late in the piece, but they are so thinly sketched it did not add to my understanding of the characters.
Crush feels like the inverse of The Batman in that it feels like it would benefit from a director’s cut. As is, it is very enjoyable, but it lacks depth.
What power it does have solely comes from the cast:
Rowan Blanchard and Auliʻi Cravalho are great tougher. There is a nervous energy to their growing rapport that is winning. Neither character is that fleshed out, so it is a testament to their performances that the movie works as well as it does.
Megan Mullally is the comic MVP - the material is not strong but she pulls it off. On the re-watch she comes across as a one-liner machine. It is nice to see such an open-minded parental figure, but there is no texture or levels to her relationship with Paige.
AJ’s relationship with her sister and her parents feels shortchanged - her conflict is introduced late in the piece, and expressed entirely in dialogue. While the movie is Paige’s story, the ending is partially dependant on AJ’s growth. It is an emotional payoff with no journey.
Crush is a sweet, slight movie. It is too slight in its characterisation and script, but the cast’s chemistry is almost enough to get it over the finish line.
In that respect, it is pretty in line with most romcoms. In itself, that is kind of important. We should have more movies featuring LGBT+ people which are allowed to be average.
It is fun and charming, but you will leave wishing it had a little more meat on its bones.
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