The summer book

Charlie McDowell’s The Summer Book arrives as a deceptively modest film, but one that quickly reveals its layers to those patient enough to surrender to its rhythm. Adapted by Robert Jones from Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel, it is the portrait of a family caught between grief and renewal, of generations bound together on a remote Finnish island where time seems suspended. What emerges is less a conventional narrative than a tapestry of moments — sunlit silences, fragments of dialogue, shared glances — each weighted with the inevitability of loss and the fragile beauty of life continuing. This is not cinema that pushes forward so much as cinema that drifts, and in that drifting lies its strength and its weakness.

At its center is Glenn Close, embodying a grandmother whose body is weary but whose mind remains sharp, playful, and occasionally caustic. It is a performance rooted in stillness: the stoop of her shoulders, the drag of her feet on mossy ground, the calm defiance with which she lights a cigarette at dusk. For decades her character has returned to this cabin by the Gulf of Finland, but this summer is different — it is the first without her daughter, whose death hangs over the family without ever being spoken aloud. Sharing the island with her are her son, played with aching restraint by Anders Danielsen Lie, and her granddaughter Sophia, brought to life with striking naturalism by newcomer Emily Matthews. The trio’s time together is shaped less by plot than by rituals: planting a tree in rocky soil, sailing across choppy waters, wandering through a “magic forest” of moss and reeds.

Charlie McDowell, known until now for his claustrophobic thrillers such as The One I Love and Windfall, takes an unexpected turn here, embracing restraint and meditative stillness. His staging often feels like a quiet homage to Ingmar Bergman’s island films, though without the same psychological intensity. Instead, Charlie McDowell is content to let the landscape breathe, trusting Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s cinematography to carry the emotional weight. The camera lingers on glacial waters dissolving into summer currents, or sunlight dancing across Sophia’s face as she asks her grandmother if she will die soon. It is in these pauses that the film’s emotional truth emerges: grief is not always expressed through dialogue or confession, but through silence, avoidance, and the way people carry themselves in spaces once filled by another’s presence.

Yet this same restraint can be alienating. Critics have noted that the film often seems “light on plot,” and there are moments when the languid pacing feels less like meditation than stagnation. A sequence where Sophia prays for a storm because she is “bored as beef” reflects a sentiment some audience members may share. The storm eventually comes, and while it injects a fleeting sense of peril, the dramatic swell feels almost perfunctory, a concession to narrative expectation rather than organic development. Similarly, Anders Danielsen Lie’s character remains underdeveloped — too often relegated to the background, his grief distilled into metaphorical shots of weather vanes and gray skies rather than earned emotional beats.

Where the film succeeds unequivocally is in the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter. Their exchanges range from humorous — Glenn Close chiding her granddaughter about the etiquette of trespassing on a neighbor’s property, or lamenting the onslaught of “time on top of time” — to tenderly profound. One of the film’s most affecting moments comes when Sophia describes sleeping in a tent so vividly that her grandmother, who can no longer recall the sensation herself, closes her eyes and smiles as if transported back to her own youth. It is in these details, so small they might be overlooked, that Charlie McDowell honors Tove Jansson’s gift for finding universality in fleeting incidents.

The score by Hania Rani plays a crucial role, shaping the mood with piano compositions that hover between melancholy and serenity. At times, the music overwhelms, filling emotional gaps the script cannot bridge, but more often it becomes the heartbeat of the film, carrying viewers through passages where dialogue recedes into silence. Complementing this is the tactile authenticity of the production design: the creaking wood of the cabin, the scratch of woolen sweaters, the mossy ground that Glenn Close’s grandmother calls her obsession. The sensory detail evokes not only the world of the characters but also Tove Jansson herself, who spent decades on an island much like this one, seeking refuge in nature after the death of her mother.

Still, the adaptation cannot entirely escape its limitations. On the page, Jansson’s novel was a series of luminous fragments, each glimmering like “lights on a string,” as Ali Smith once described it. On screen, those fragments sometimes feel static, their magic dissipating in the effort to literalize them. Where the book invited readers to imagine the spaces between words, the film too often fills them with pauses that risk monotony. For viewers accustomed to narrative propulsion, The Summer Book may feel like an exercise in endurance. But for those willing to embrace its rhythm, it becomes a cinematic equivalent of sitting by the sea, where little happens and yet everything does.

What lingers most after the credits roll is not the thin thread of story but the cumulative weight of atmosphere — the salt in the air, the rustle of birch trees, the knowledge that grief, like the tide, recedes and returns endlessly. Glenn Close delivers a performance that feels like a farewell, not only to her granddaughter within the story but also to audiences who have followed her through decades of formidable work. Emily Matthews, meanwhile, establishes herself as a name to remember, balancing innocence with an intuitive grasp of the film’s deeper undercurrents. And Anders Danielsen Lie, even underused, conveys in his silences the shadow of a man paralyzed by loss.

The Summer Book is not flawless — it wavers between being meditative and soporific, profound and meandering. But it earns respect for refusing to pander, sentimentalize, or over-explain. In an era of cinema obsessed with spectacle, Charlie McDowell has made a film about the quiet persistence of life in the wake of death, about moss and memory, storms and stillness. Its true achievement lies in reminding us that grief is not something to be solved, only lived with — and that healing, like the growth of a tree in rocky soil, requires patience, care, and time. For some, that may not be enough. For others, it will be everything.

The summer book
Directed by Charlie McDowell
Written by Robert Jones
Based on The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Produced by Aleksi Bardy, Kevin Loader, Kath Mattock, Charlie McDowell, Duncan Montgomery, Alex Orlovsky, Helen Vinogradov
Starring  Glenn Close, Emily Matthews, Anders Danielsen Lie
Cinematography : Sturla Brandth Grøvlen
Edited by Jussi Rautaniemi
Music by Hania Rani
Production companies : Free Range Films, Stille Productions, High Frequency Entertainment, Helsinki Filmi
Distributed by Music Box Films (United States)
Release dates : 12 October 2024 (BFI), 19 September 2025 (United States)
Running time : 90 minutes

Seen on September 10 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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