A Future of Success
2019 · 10m · USA
Directed by Justin Zuckerman
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age
Tones: humorous, melancholic
A high schooler who'd rather garden gets ambushed by college-prep panic and a wealthy peer's rumor campaign. The future, it turns out, is a thing other people are doing to her.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A coming-of-age movie that knows the real horror isn't growing up — it's everyone else's frantic insistence that you do. Zuckerman's off-kilter tone keeps it from collapsing into another Sundance pity-fest.
Teen ambition as antagonist and gardening as the radical act is a sneaky-good premise, and Zuckerman is a filmmaker who knows how to let a teen comedy stay prickly. Less empathy-bath than Eighth Grade, which is to its credit.
Gardening as the radical-act counter to college-prep panic, plus a rich-kid rumor subplot — that's two clear pressures squeezing the same character. The "do you really think Harvard…" line is a real teacher voice, not a parody of one.
Reviews
a teen comedy about young adult pressures that injects a bit of narrative while maintaining experimentation and off-kilter tone