One of the harshest facets of childhood is the profoundly upsetting realisation that many people are often lying to you, most cruelly of all your parents. Lucy Cohen’s Edge of Summer, premiering at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, follows a young girl on holiday in Cornwall in the early 1990s with her mother, as she confronts in both direct and sublimated ways an adult world where things aren’t always what they seem.

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11-year-old Evie (Flora Hylton) is excited to spend some time alone with her mother, Yvonne (Josie Walker), but as soon as they arrive the pair are greeted by Tony (Steffan Rhodri), a patronising man who can barely conceal his intentions towards Evie’s mother. Already it seems obvious that the two adults have ulterior motives, as they encourage Evie to go play with other kids in the village. But a confrontation between mother and daughter later on, after Evie accidentally glimpses the couple having sex, suggests that we viewers were supposed to be just as shocked and disgusted as the little girl was at the sight — that we are meant to share Evie’s state of mind and her perspective much more than we actually do. 

Herein lies the film’s main flaw: too often, we are told what to feel, rather than made to feel it. Certain elements signal that we are sharing Evie’s point of view: actual POV shots when she meets the cute and mysterious local boy Adam (Joel Sefton-Iongi), and most of all the fact that she records her thoughts on an audiotape for her absent father to listen to later. However, Hylton’s naturalistic performance does go some way towards drawing us into the psyche of her character, a child who feels things vividly and, as is realistic for her age, is often shy and afraid of the world around her. When she follows Adam into a local abandoned mine, we feel both how brave she wants to be for the sake of following this intriguing stranger, and the fear she is fighting off as the two of them get deeper and deeper into the dark tunnel. 

The film’s unstable handling of perspective is at its strangest and boldest when we suddenly leave Evie to follow Adam instead. In two rather elegantly mirroring scenes, we see Adam overhear Evie’s mother crying on the phone, revealing a sadness Evie is oblivious to; in the other scene, it is Evie who learns a secret about Adam’s family, accidentally hearing his mother talk about his absent father. Each child will have to decide whether to tell the other a truth that their own parent is keeping from them. 

The idea of these two children being reflections of each other is original, establishing an elegant and poetic symmetry. But except for these two parallel sequences, it is executed in a rather confusing manner. At the bottom of the mine, Evie and Adam hear the voice of a man who urges them to leave him alone. As both children come into greater conflict with their mothers, they begin to see this dark and scary place as a sort of refuge. The mine soon begins to appear as a potentially magical, psychic terrain where Adam and Evie can face, in the form of a frightening booming voice, all their fears and frustrations. Their parents never even know that they go down there — is it even real? And is there really somebody in the hole?

The way in which that question is resolved is very confusing; once it is understood, it also seems wildly unrealistic, and narratively unsatisfying. The supposedly profound realisations that it represents for each child feel anticlimactic because they seemed rather obvious before already. While we can salute the ambition behind the film’s bold concept, it is a shame to see an intriguing idea so muddled in the telling. 

Edge of Summer was produced by Dorothy Street Pictures and BBC Film.