THE STORY – Rural New Zealand, 2006. Over one transformative summer, 14-year-old Sid Bookman discovers desire, identity, and the internet, as she imitates the people she longs to be loved by.
THE CAST – Ani Palmer, Noah Taylor, Rain Spencer, Beatrix Rain Wolfe, Ngataitangirua Hita & Tara Canton
THE TEAM – Paloma Schneideman (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 100 Minutes
There is a specific kind of discomfort in watching a film that understands your past with more clarity than you possessed while living it. In “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” writer-director Paloma Schneideman captures the stifling atmosphere of growing up queer in the late 2000s with such precision that it becomes less of a viewing experience and more of an excavation. For those of us who navigated this early digital frontier as queer teenagers, this film is a masterful piece of writing. Still, it can also be a profoundly heavy, even difficult, watch.
Set in New Zealand in 2006, the film opens on a note of chilling authenticity: 14-year-old Sid (a luminous Ani Palmer) bathed in the blue light of a monitor, venturing into the unregulated wilderness of chat rooms. It is a moment of recognition for a generation that sought self-definition through conversations with anonymous, often predatory strangers. For Sid, the internet is not just a tool; it is the laboratory where she begins to synthesize an identity that feels too dangerous to express in the physical world.
Palmer’s performance is a study in quiet isolation. She carries a distance on her face, an internal weather system of longing and caution, most evident when she is at home. Her father, a landscaper whose exhaustion manifests as a constant, abrasive irritability, creates a domestic environment where Sid is always bracing for impact. His persistent swearing and low-level hostility provide the background noise for her solitude. In this environment, the film strongly captures how lonely it is growing up queer and feeling like you don’t have a support system.
The tragedy of Sid’s summer lies in the way her burgeoning desire for the popular girl, Lana (Beatrix Rain Wolfe), forces her to adopt a series of masks. Using the MSN account of her friend Tia’s (Ngataitangirua Hita) brother, Sid initiates a digital relationship with Lana, asking the intimate questions she’s too terrified to voice in person. It is a heartbreakingly accurate depiction of the social web era—a time when queer youth had to siphon their truths through the avatars of anonymity. Schneideman’s direction, characterized by intimate close-up photography, keeps us locked into Sid’s perspective. The camera lingers on the curve of a shoulder or the movement of a body, reflecting the hyper-awareness of a girl whose gaze is beginning to wake up, even as her voice remains silent.
While Sid’s pursuit of Lana leads her into the company of older boys who treat her with a dismissive, predatory annoyance, the film offers a singular point of warmth in Freya (Rain Spencer), the American exchange student who is friends with Sid’s older sister, Adele (Tara Canton). The bond between Sid and Freya is one of the few instances in the film where genuine tenderness is allowed. In these scenes, we see the girl Sid could be if she weren’t so busy trying to mimic the “cool” kids who clearly don’t want her there.
However, Schneideman refuses to sugarcoat the toxicity of these formative years. The film wallows in the suffocation of teenagehood—the cringe-inducing sexual inquiries from boys that Sid doesn’t yet have the vocabulary to process, and the betrayal of her only real friend, Tia, as Sid becomes blinded by the dopamine hit of a crush. It captures the specific exhaustion of an era when queer representation was something you had to download in secret, hoping the file wouldn’t crash your computer.
“Big Girls Don’t Cry” is an uncompromising portrait of a period when we were conscious of everything but lacked the language for any of it. It is a film about the high cost of imitation and the crushing weight of navigating a world that hasn’t yet made room for you. It is undeniably well-written, but it’s no easy time to relive. The film leaves you in the quiet, dusty heat of a 2006 summer, reminding you of how hard you had to fight just to survive in your own skin.
