Summary
Nico Parker delivers a star-making performance in Laura Chinn’s Suncoast, a captivating coming-of-age drama exploring the struggle of dealing with loss.
Suncoast is a coming-of-age drama written and directed by Laura Chinn, which debuted at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Chinn’s screenplay, which is based on events from her life in the early 2000s, was featured on the 2020 Black List, which ranks the most liked screenplays not produced. The film stars Laura Linney, Nico Parker, and Woody Harrelson.
Suncoast is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who meets an activist protesting one of the biggest medical cases of all time while dealing with her brother’s illness.
Doris is trying to balance appeasing her mother by helping with her disabled brother while trying to be a teenager. With her dad already gone and her brother on the verge of passing away, Doris and her mother Kristine’s relationship is shaky at best. One day, at a cafe, a stranger behind her named Paul offers to pay for Doris’s food as she doesn’t have enough money.
The two form an unlikely friendship over the grief they both have faced in life. He encourages her to talk to her brother even though he can’t talk back and form a relationship with her mother, as life can take anyone away in an instant. Whenever life throws Doris a curveball, she seeks out Paul to try and piece things back together.
It takes a little while for the film to catch on, but when we are introduced to Woody Harrelson’s Paul, the pace picks up. Paul and Doris are an unlikely dynamic, but the trauma that each has faced forms a beautiful bond. Paul becomes somewhat of a father figure to Doris, whether teaching her how to handle her emotions or how to drive.
Harrelson isn’t new to the game, nor is Nico Parker, whose mother is the immensely talented Thandiwe Newton. We can see that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree because watching Parker bring Doris, who has been through the wringer, to life is magical. It’s such a fierce yet empathetic performance that makes you dive head-first into her journey. The best is yet to come for this young actress.
Chinn’s script doesn’t dance around the tragedy, yet it shows a more authentic approach to how often we don’t know how to handle the cards we are dealt and try to find laughter within that pain. The modern world fails to highlight that each person can deal with grief in his or her unique way. Still, Chinn captures the essence of that struggle and shows the dynamic between two different human beings dealing with similar circumstances. We often hear the term coming-of-age thrown around, but Suncoast delivers in a way that not many films have captured.
Ultimately, Suncoast is a brilliant debut from writer/director Laura Chinn. It’s a perfectly balanced coming-of-age story featuring a star-making turn from Nico Parker. This is the perfect streaming movie, and I highly recommend checking it out when it drops on Hulu.
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