HELL OF A SUMMER – a film by Billy Bryk & Finn Wolfhard (limited spoilers) ⁓

Jason Hochberg (Fred Hechinger) is chauffered to Camp Pineway by his mother Maggie (Susan Coyne). Jason has a big friendly puppy-dog personality, and goes to the camp every summer. This year was supposed to be different, but Camp Supervisors John Hurwitz (Adam Pally) and Kathy Anderson (Rosebud Baker) invited him to join the counseling staff and he passed up a position at a legal firm to take the $110/week job. He thinks this is because he likes going to summer camp more than anything else. The events of the following 24 hours will make Jason realize his true motivation.

John and Kathy arrived the previous night, and were the first to die. Of the eleven counselors who arrive subsequently, only five will survive. This carnage-filled murder mystery is also a love story. The suspect list follows.

Bobby and Chris (played by the two guys who made the movie) arrive in a car borrowed from Bobby’s stepfather Dale, whom we do not meet. As the murder victims pile up, he wonders aloud why he isn’t hot enough to be killed. Chris’ father is also absent, and we get no further details on any of that, but their daddy issues point to them as potential killers. Chris seems interested in getting together with Shannon (Krista Nazaire), who is much more interested in Bobby. But Bobby seems more interested in Chris.

Ari Jolivet (Daniel Gravelle) has a nut allergy about which he is overly defensive and has written a screenplay titled “Field of Death”. He is also interested in Shannon and has her read it. She is unimpressed.

Miley (Julia Doyle) is a struggling vegan. To be fair, the vegan dinner option at camp is a not-very-attractive grilled tofu burger. MIley dresses colourfully (pastels) and hates herself for sneaking the occasional bit of meat when no one’s looking.

Demi (Pardis Saremi) does make-up tutorials and is something of a diva. She is well-dressed and her car and luggage mark her as coming from a wealthy family, so being a camp counselor seems out of character.

Mike (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) brags about knocking out a cop, and wears a cap from “Big Sun Ranch” which sounds like another summer camp.

Claire (Abby Quinn) had a bad breakup three weeks previously. (“He broke my heart”, she tells Jason.) She can handle a bow and arrow, which turns out to be a useful skill.

Noelle (Julia Lalonde) is reading a book called “Spirit Talk: Communicating with the Beyond” Mystically inclined, she is handy with a ouija board and tries to use one to make contact with one of the early victims. She asks who did this to him, and the board answers IDEK, which is interpreted to mean “I don’t even know.”

This might be a reference to Julian Doucet‘s 2022 comedy series ‘The Lake’), In “Midsommar Madness” (episode 106 of that show, Lalonde’s character Olive, in a similarly bucolic setting, used a ouija board to ask after the history of a cabin where a murder allegedly occurred.

Ezra (Matthew Finlan) is in charge of the camp’s theatre productions. He’s planning a ‘gritty re-imagining” of Pinocchio and suggests that Jason might be perfect for the role of old man Geppetto. “There’s something deeply sad and broken about you,” he tells Jason. “I think it’ll come across nicely on stage.” Later that evening, Ezra rehearses Puck’s monologue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Act 3 Scene II:

“My mistress with a monster is in love.
Near to her close and to consecrated bower,
While she was in her dull and sleeping hour,
A crew of patches, rude mechanicals
Who work for bread upon Athenian stalls.
Were met together to rehearse a play
Intended for great Theseus’ nuptial day.”

Right after that (in Shakespeare’s play) Titania, who has unknowingly been given a love potion by her servant Puck, wakes and falls in love with a weaver named Bottom, who has been disguised as a donkey.

The counselors’ individual and collective response to being pursued by a killer quickly turns into a comedy of errors, contributing to the low survival rate. One wonders, though, if all this bloodletting might have a single karmic purpose, that being to bring together the figurative fairy queen and with the metaphorical donkey/workman.

Once the killers are dead and the threat is ended, as the sun rises over the lake, the serendipitous lovers watch the sun rise over the lake and surrender to inevitability as “Good Times” by Eric Burdon and the Animals plays in the background.

Finn Wolfhard told Ayesha Rascoe of NPR: “One of the big reasons why we wrote the film was because we were kind of sick of seeing movies – when characters are put into dangerous situations, they kind of just become heroes randomly, and it doesn’t really feel like a part of their character. And so the idea behind these characters is just, what would you do in this situation? And would your insecurities and, you know, your sort of quirks go away? And the answer is no. They would actually probably be amplified in these moments of kind of stress or danger. And that’s where a lot of the comedy also comes.”

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HELL OF A SUMMER can be streamed on HULU.