[Movies] Summer of '84

Summer of '84: After suspecting that their police officer neighbor is a serial killer, a group of teenage friends spend their summer spying on him and gathering evidence, but as they get closer to discovering the truth, things get dangerous.

I thought this was an '80s movie; turns out, it was actually made in 2018. It's a convincing homage to '80s mystery/thriller movies; gets the aesthetic very right. (And I watched it on a streaming service that tends to display a little grainy, which probably added to the vintage je ne sais quoi, ha.)

For much of the film, the mood is pretty light; it plays up the "group of plucky kids bumbling around trying to solve this mystery" thing for quite a while. But then it takes a turn for the dark, and kept getting darker. However, the change in direction isn't out of nowhere. I feel like it was executed rather well.

While I wouldn't say that I love this film, I would say that it does exactly what it sets out to do, and it does it very well. Nails the aesthetic, the mystery, the buildup, the reveal. The pacing felt right for the type of movie it was making homage to and for the story it was telling. It's the kind of movie that I would watch a second time just to get a fresh view of how everything slots into place now that I know how it goes.

One thing I could have done without was the period-typical sexism.
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Anyway. I've seen this labelled in a few places as a horror movie (including on Hoopla, where I borrowed it from). I would say it fits more clearly into the mystery/thriller genre. Not that it doesn't have horror elements, but it feels more... horror-adjacent, I think. I've also seen a lot of comparisons to the Stranger Things series, but as far as I can tell the only thing they have in common is the time period they're set in. There's nothing scifi about this movie.

Worth a look if it seems like your kind of thing, but not something I'd recommend otherwise.