Edge of Everything

by Christie Robb

In the middle of the long transition from child to adult, high school freshman Abby (Sierra McCormick, The Vast of Night) loses her primary caregiver. Now, she has to move in with a distant father (Jason Butler Harner, Ozark) and his much younger partner and navigate her grief and the horrors of adolescence without much of a safety net.

She’s got her friends, sure—a few she seems to have known since kindergarten. They all seem smart, stable, sensible.

But they aren’t what she’s craving right now. Abby is looking for distraction and drama. And she finds it in Caroline (Ryan Simpkins, Fear Street), an underage drinker and Bad Influence willing to trade sexual favors for drugs or booze. With Caroline, Abby experiments with a new persona and new experiences, some of which veer toward the dangerous.

The film could have become a morality play, but the debut feature-length writer/director team of Sophia Sabella and Pablo Feldman aren’t here for that. Instead, they depict—without judgement—a slice of what can be a hugely complicated time in a person’s life, even when they aren’t flattened under a glacier’s worth of grief.

With its short run time, The Edge of Everything could have stood to flesh out some of the relationships and characters a bit more, particularly that between Abby and her father. But what we do have is good. McCormick delivers such a subtle, natural performance that at times it’s hard to remember you are watching an actor at work. She’s a talent to keep an eye on.