Growing Pains

When it comes to films aimed at US teenagers, there’s no shortage of work focused on high schoolers, but middle schoolers don’t get much attention. Their presence is usually limited to coming of age tales set in unfamiliar places, or to tales in which they function as naïve observers of adult interactions. Catherine Argyrople’s sweet-natured indie drama focuses on two friends navigating the summer between middle school and high school, easing out of a space where both have grown bored into a new world with a whole new set of challenges.

Zoe (Molly Morneweck) is a survivor of childhood cancer. We never learn what kind, but the treatment has left her with a scar across her abdomen which makes her super self-conscious, as a visit to a pool party reveals. Conscious that she needs to do something that will build up her confidence and give her direction, she tries out for the rowing team at her new school and is thrilled when she’s accepted. To make things even better, it leads to a new friendship and that, in turn, leads to attention from a boy. But with these opportunities come new weight-related anxieties and the discovery that not everybody who wants her attention deserves it.

Natalia (Deanna Tarraza), Zoe’s best friend, has problems on her own, mostly revolving around her family’s tendency to use her for babysitting and shifts at their taco bar without any consideration for her own needs. The only family member she really feels valued by, her grandmother, falls ill, prompting her to think about mortality for the first time. Things start to look up when a new girl, Lexie (Maia Isabel Frias) starts work at the taco bar, prompting Natalia to make successive late night internet searches on ‘girls kissing’ and ‘how to clear browser history’ – but will Lexie feel the same way about her, and if she does, will their relationship be accepted by other people?

With both girls feeling overwhelmed, their friendship begins to drift, depriving each of them of an important anchor – a situation they will both have to take some responsibility for before they can resolve the problem. Zoe also has lessons to learn in respect of her relationship with her mother (Deb LeClair), who has been overprotective since her illness but sometimes has to step in for good reason.

The story is sweetly delivered without the heavy moralising that often plagues teen films, and there will be plenty for viewers that age to relate to. Unfortunately it suffers from a host of other issues. It’s Argyrople’s first feature and although she handles the pacing of the story well, individual scenes are much more uneven. This isn’t helped by over-hasty editing which cuts them down to the bare bones, so that the dialogue is squeezed in and then we’re immediately off to somewhere else, with no room for anything to breathe. The absence of ambient sound adds to the sense of artificiality that this creates. Furthermore, the different scenes have not had their sound levels balanced, so if you’re watching at home you will have to keep adjusting the volume.

The lead actors are all capable and do their best with the sometimes heavy-handed dialogue, but they really needed more rehearsal time to generate chemistry, with scenes between Zoe and her mother, in particular, feeling stilted. The supporting performances are of variable quality. Fortunately the worst offenders don’t have much screentime. It’s possible that young people who have grown up with soap operas will find it easy to take these problems in their stride. One would hope that Argyrople would find them easy enough to solve on a second outing.

If you can get past these practical issues, Growing Pains is a likeable film which manages to pack in a lot of important topics whilst remaining much more grounded than most of its ilk.

Growing Pains is currently screening on Tubi.

Reviewed on: 10 Nov 2025