Growing up Between Bunks

MOVIE REVIEW
The Floaters
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Genre: Comedy
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 1h 41m
Director(s): Rachel Israel
Writer(s): Amelia Brain, Andra Gordon, Brent Hoff
Cast: Jackie Tohn, Sarah Podemski, Aya Cash, Judah Lewis, Nina Bloomgarden, Jake Ryan, Seth Green, Jonathan Silverman, Steve Guttenberg, Dan Ahdoot, Thani Brant, Jim Kaplan, Jacob Moskovitz, Bekah Zornosa, Jillian Jordyn
Where to Watch: in theaters July 10, 2026, opens at Quad Cinema in New York with cast & crew Q&As, expands to LA, Chicago, and beyond beginning July 17

RAVING REVIEW: Summer camp movies usually understand something adults seem to forget the second they leave the cabins behind. A few weeks away from home can feel like an entire lifetime. THE FLOATERS uses that as both its playground and the emotion that drives the story, building a warm, fast-moving comedy around the people who don’t quite fit into the expectations, the clique, or the version of themselves everyone else keeps expecting them to be.

Rachel Israel’s film follows Nomi, played by Jackie Tohn, a musician who loses her place in her band right before a major shift in her life was supposed to begin. With her confidence rattled and her future less certain, she accepts a job from her childhood best friend, Mara, played by Sarah Podemski, at the Jewish summer camp they once attended together. Mara is now the camp director, overwhelmed by a failing septic system, financial pressures, and the kind of responsibility that makes nostalgia feel less magical. Nomi, meanwhile, is tasked with supervising the Floaters, a group of campers who haven’t signed up for activities and don’t seem especially interested in being folded into the camp’s official idea of fun.

The film’s personality comes from the specificity of its world. Camp Daveed isn’t treated as a generic summer camp with a few cultural details sprinkled over the top. The Jewish setting shapes the humor, conflicts, rituals, questions of identity, and sense of belonging that run throughout the story. Israel isn’t making the culture a punchline or a lecture. She’s making it feel alive. Some references may land harder for viewers with Jewish camp experience, but the emotion is easy to understand. Everybody knows what it feels like to be the person on the edge of the group, pretending not to care whether anyone notices.

Tohn gives Nomi the right mix of defiance and damage. She’s funny because she doesn’t try too hard to be lovable, and the film is better for that. Nomi can be careless, impulsive, and too eager to chase a win if it lets her avoid sitting with her own disappointment. Tohn plays with the flaws without dulling the character’s appeal. Her Nomi is the kind of adult who can connect with teenagers because she’s not completely done being one herself, at least not in the ways that matter the most. That makes her a credible mentor for the Floaters and a complicated friend for Mara.

Podemski’s Mara is just as important to the film’s balance. She could’ve been reduced to the caricature of the friend who needs to loosen up, but Podemski brings more to the role than that. Mara cares about the camp because she understands what it means beyond the cabins and competitions. She’s trying to preserve a community while everyone around her wants something from her. From solutions, money, patience, flexibility, and emotional availability. Her bond with Nomi gives the film stakes that run parallel to the campers’ stories. These two women have history, affection, resentment, and a shared past they can’t quite return to.

Judah Lewis, Nina Bloomgarden, Jake Ryan, Thani Brant, Jim Kaplan, Jacob Moskovitz, Bekah Zornosa, and Jillian Jordyn help create a group that, by design, feels scattered at first. These kids are awkward, defensive, dramatic, performative, and occasionally unbearable in exactly the way campers should be. The film gets a lot from letting them clash before they bond. The Floaters don’t become a found family because the screenplay tells them to; they get there through irritation, embarrassment, and the slow realization that nobody else at camp knows what to do with them.

Aya Cash brings a sharp comic presence as Rabbi Rachel, a character who could’ve easily become a quirky side note. Instead, Cash makes her feel like someone who understands both the ridiculousness and the seriousness of camp life. She carries herself with enough calm to make the chaos around her funnier, and she gives the film a few of its more thoughtful moments. Seth Green has fun as Daniel, from the rival camp whose presence gives Mara and Nomi’s old wounds something to push against.

Once the Floaters begin to function as a group, the movie finds its real lane. The comedy becomes less about setup and more about personality. The camp competition gives the story an easy focus, but the film works because the stakes become emotional rather than purely logistical. Saving the camp matters, yes, but the bigger question is whether these people can stop treating themselves as temporary. Nomi has to decide whether failure has made her useless or simply available for a different kind of purpose. The kids have to decide whether being outsiders means staying detached forever. Mara has to decide whether keeping the camp alive requires controlling every piece of it.

THE FLOATERS is strongest when it celebrates Jewish joy without sanitizing it. The film allows disagreement, awkwardness, insecurity, ritual, humor, and frustration to sit together. This isn’t a movie about unity. It’s about the messier version of community, the kind where people argue, annoy each other, misunderstand each other, and somehow still end up singing, performing, competing, or eating together. That sense of cultural warmth feels especially meaningful because the film isn’t built around trauma or explanation. It’s built around life.

THE FLOATERS is a heartfelt, funny, culturally specific camp comedy with more personality than polish. It doesn’t reinvent the summer camp movie, and it occasionally tries to carry too many people through the same trail. The parts that work, though, work with real warmth: Tohn and Podemski’s friendship, Cash’s offbeat wisdom, the young cast’s growing chemistry, and Israel’s clear affection for the camp world she’s bringing to the screen.

By the end, THE FLOATERS feels like a movie about returning to the place where you once hoped someone would understand you and discovering that you might now be the person who helps someone else feel understood. The film is messy in spots, but so is camp, and so are people. Sometimes the misfits don’t need to become less strange. They just need the right bunk, the right stage, and enough time to realize they weren’t floating alone.

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[photo courtesy of BRAINSTORM MEDIA]

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