“Edge of Everything” begins with a death. Abby’s (Sierra McCormick) mother has passed. The fourteen-year-old moves in grudgingly with her dad, David (Jason Butler Harner), and his partner, Leslie (Sabina Friedman-Seitz). Abby projects her resentment quite overtly, refusing to mask her anger with any niceties. She’s obviously devastated but has drifted away from her dad to let him in and accept any of his tenderness. It is at a later point we come to know Abby has had her dad around barely for the past ten years, and her mother had only been her constant and ultimate pivot of support. That her dad and Leslie have been trying for a kid makes her establish her distance further.
While Leslie is quite direct and forthright with her, David puts all his might and patience into being considerate to and forgiving of Abby’s temper and frostiness. He understands he hasn’t been around and probably doesn’t feel has the right to assert himself on his daughter if she is reluctant to open up. He gives her the time and space, much to Leslie’s displeasure. Therefore, conversations among the three of them are only ever so poised on the anvil of breakdown. It is not just her dad that Abby finds herself at a remove from but also her friends. The void compels her to hunt for other, wilder experiences she may not have around them.
A recklessness takes over her, and she becomes increasingly disconnected from them. The loss ruptures the fabric of ordinariness for her, and she seeks stimulations that she thinks may help tide over the gnawing grief, which she cannot even share with anyone. This sends her hurtling down a path where she is drawn to stuff her group may balk her from participating in. It drives into motion in her a certain heedlessness for consequence, a wandering fearlessness propelled by the absence of an emotional anchor. Her friends gauge her restlessness, she bats them away. She starts to smoke, much to their concern and apprehension.
Seeing them reinstate a distance, she turns her yearning gaze elsewhere. Out with her friends at a café, she is struck by a girl, Caroline (Ryan Simkins), who comes swooshing in, utterly sure in her skin and whipping out an uproarious energy. Abby is instantly captivated by Caroline’s heady allure, which doesn’t interest her friends, possibly striking them as too risqué. She’s wholly swept away by her, allowing herself to be pulled into her orbit as she recedes from her familiar circle.
The screenplay penned by the directors themselves, Pablo Feldman and Sophia Sabella, deliberately keeps us in the dark as to Caroline’s backstory, except that she has a fraught relationship with her feuding parents. She is untethered from any restriction, pursuing whatever attracts her, which fascinates Abby, who is emboldened by her influence. Caroline’s rashness and her proclivity for leaping on an immediate impulse induce in Abby a means of unleashing her own pent-up emotional turbulence, which she doesn’t find any approximating echo in the mundane, risk-free dawdle of her old friends.
Her flirting with danger becomes an outlet of release, despite her unease. Abby keeps her emotions and desires concealed as she plunges into tasting the adventurous, boundless thrill of freedom that Caroline swivels her toward. The directors intently highlight the specific time in their lives Abby and her friends are in. It is the final year of middle school. Most of them find themselves obliged to stick by rules and be super watchful in fear of the price of transgression. Caroline represents a form of independence that may thereby seem to them as excessive and unwarranted.
Perceptively, the film nods to that particular tug that kicks in being torn between testing or skirting the purportedly illicit. The girls have a sharp consciousness of what is advised against; Caroline exemplifies those to them. They are taken aback by Abby’s new inclinations. But they don’t vocalize their reproach so ardently lest they be held as too prudish. The film acutely taps the particularity of this, and it is to the credit of the writing not an iota of harsh judgment is ascribed to what may be called a string of bad decisions. It is simultaneous with developing a sense of what one needs to be wary of.
Edited by Benjamin Shearn in a manner that mirrors the slapdash rush of Abby in inadvertently veering to disaster, “Edge of Everything” is steered by an incredibly intuitive Sierra McCormick. The actor is tightly attuned to every flicker of jangled nerves, nailing a perfect mix of uncertainty and pressing urges. Among the supporting cast, Emily Robinson registers the strongest. The biggest triumph of the film lies in its fierce, unflinching commitment to evoking unsure responses. The directors show confidence and intelligence in allowing the viewer to linger with that feeling to the very end, where some headway seems to have been made between the father and daughter but with any inauthentic absolution whittled away.
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