Chasing Summer: When the Director Doesn’t Trust Comedy

Josephine Decker's Chasing Summer is a film at war with itself. Decker wants to make something bleak and formally risky. Iliza Shlesinger's script wants to make people laugh. The two impulses never quite align, and the result is strange enough to be worth watching.

Shlesinger plays Jamie, a forty-something aid worker who comes home after a very public romantic failure—the kind of humiliation that happens now on social media. She's not triumphant. She's diminished, looking for refuge in the places she used to know. Decker shoots the hometown setting with a particular strangeness, as though the familiar is hiding something. Cinematographer Eric Branco gives the town a golden light that looks nostalgic but stays suspicious about nostalgia itself.

Jamie reconnects with an ex (Tom Welling) in ways that feel both emotionally genuine and desperately nostalgic—she wants him, but she also wants to be wanted, and she's not sure which is which. Megan Mullally appears as a mother figure whose own compromises hang over the film like a shadow of where Jamie might end up. Lola Tung's younger character suggests Decker's real interest: how women at different ages navigate diminished circumstances and the choices they've made.

The runtime moves quick, but Decker frequently holds scenes past their comedic punchline into something quieter and more desolate. There's a moment near the end where Jamie sits alone in a car in silence—no music, no dialogue. That silence is the film's most honest note.

Chasing Summer splits critics predictably. Those who like Shlesinger's wit and Decker's cold visual style find things to value. Others see a fundamental mismatch between a director interested in unease and material built for comedic catharsis. Both readings make sense. The film sometimes feels like two different movies competing for control.

What keeps Chasing Summer from working as a whole is Decker's refusal to give Shlesinger's script the emotional payoff it occasionally seeks. She shoots warmth with subtle skepticism, as though beauty itself needs interrogation. Yet this refusal becomes the film's best asset: it insists that coming home is always regressive, that nostalgia conceals as much as it shows, that the people we were are ghosts haunting the people we've become.