CRSHD – A Mixed Coming Of Age Comedy

The immense success of Kay Cannon’s 2018 directorial debut Blockers and more recently, Olivia Wilde’s highly acclaimed debut Booksmart, has lead to an increase of raunchy coming-of-age comedies that focus specifically on female friendships. The latest film to emerge from this subgenre is CRSHD, another directorial debut from Emily Cohn.

The premise of CRSHD is relatively simple. Izzy Alden (Barbier) is a freshmen in college who is seen as a social outcast and is self-conscious about the fact that she is still a virgin. She makes a pact with her best friend Fiona (Scott), that they will both lose their virginity before the beginning of summer, but there is only a week left of school and Izzy has yet to fulfill the pact. After finding out about a “Crush Party”to celebrate the end of the school year, she decides it’s the perfect opportunity to lose her virginity. With the help of her friends, Fiona and Anuka (Ketkar), she goes to great lengths to attend the party and fulfill her goal. The film centres in on the friendship between these three girls and how they communicate through varying social media platforms.

For better or for worse, social media is a dominant force in today’s world, becoming an increasingly popular form of communication, especially for young adults and teenagers. It is a necessity that the coming-of-age films of today, explore this connection in one way or another. However, it is difficult to portray this type of communication in an engaging way as most social media based communication is almost entirely done through text. While heavily flawed from a storytelling perspective, CRSHD portrays communication through social media in a clever and engaging way that is sure to influence filmmakers approaching this theme going forward. It brings this form of communication to life by cutting to a visual presentation of each character reading out their conversations on various social media platforms, making these interactions far more engaging to watch than they would be otherwise. Meanwhile, Cohn uses this technique to lightly poke fun at online dating and how our online persona’s vastly differ from how we interact in real life.

Unfortunately, CRSHD falters in most areas outside of its exploration of social media. As mentioned earlier, the film revolves around a female friendship where the protagonists make a pact to lose their virginity within an allotted time frame. While this premise has been successfully covered countless times before, this film lacks the heart and depth required to make it stand apart from its contemporaries. As the characters are relatively shallow for the most part, their individual storylines are not necessarily compelling to watch. The film may feature tender moments that celebrate the importance of friendship, they are unfortunately few and far between.

Despite following a fairly straight-forward premise, CRSHD is extremely convoluted as it indulges in multiple detours. Clocking in with a running time of 81 minutes, the film uses a large portion of its runtime to veer away from the main storyline and focus on each of three leads individually, which in the end doesn’t add anything substantial to the film and even takes away from the development of their shared friendship.

Overall, CRSHD is very convoluted and treads familiar waters, but it is ultimately worth checking out if interested, due to its unique exploration of how youth communicate through social media.

*still courtesy of Tribeca*

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Tristan French