Youth, Without Quotation Marks

Read Time:5 Minute, 46 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
This Too Shall Pass
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Genre: Comedy, Coming-of-Age
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 46m
Director(s): Rob Grant
Writer(s): Rob Grant, Michael Simon Baker
Cast: Maxwell Jenkins, Ben Cockell, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Aidan Laprete, Jaylin Webb, Katie Douglas, Nikki Roumel, Chris Sandiford, Joanne Kelly, Robert Longstreet, Mark McKinney, Michael Ironside
Where to Watch: coming to theaters and digital October 24, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: THIS TOO SHALL PASS lives in that liminal stretch between what teenagers swear they’re ready for and what adulthood actually demands. Set to a distinctly 80s pulse, it follows 16-year-old Simon and his close friends as they sprint toward the Canadian border for a taste of freedom, expecting a postcard of rebellion and getting a messier, more genuine weekend instead. The hook is familiar: a road trip that doubles as a reckoning. What elevates it is how rarely the film settles for an easy out. It lets immaturity be loud, friendship be complicated, and consequences arrive without preaching. For a film packaging its nostalgia in hooky, mixtape-ready textures (with all the cliches in tow), it’s surprisingly honest about how much growing up hurts.

Rob Grant directs with a light hand and a steady eye for behavior. He isn’t trying to reinvent the coming-of-age genre; he’s intent on letting it play straight. Scenes breathe long enough for small decisions to register—who hangs back when a cashier side-eyes the group, who speaks for everyone when it’s inconvenient. Those little shifts of power say more about who these kids are than any monologue could. The script keeps the core visible, but the stops along the way—petty arguments, impulsive detours, accidental tenderness—feel discovered rather than pre-programmed. You can sense the film’s comfort with contradiction: the same kid who oozes swagger will also be the first to crack when the night turns cold and the plan runs out of gas.

As Simon, Maxwell Jenkins plays hesitation without apology. He’s not “lost”; he’s sixteen, which is a much more specific condition—overconfident, underprepared, and suddenly aware of how much of himself he’s been outsourcing to other people’s expectations. Jenkins carries that tension in his shoulders and his timing; he’s often half a beat late to the truth of a scene, and the lag feels right for a kid realizing the script in his head no longer matches the one developing in front of him. Jeremy Ray Taylor leans into warmth and bruised loyalty; Aidan Laprete focuses the group’s edges without turning sour; Ben Cockell threads the needle between instigator and caretaker. Katie Douglas and Nikki Roumel aren’t reduced to plot devices; when the trip intersects with their characters, the film pauses to let their agency shape the evening rather than just decorate it. The grown-ups—Mark McKinney, Robert Longstreet, Joanne Kelly, and Michael Ironside—arrive like weather fronts: you feel pressure change when they enter a scene.

Grant’s choices are unshowy by design. Camera placements are practical, often situating us at the height of the kids’ gaze—slightly low angles in convenience stores, front-seat head-swivels when a flashing light appears in the rearview. The editorial trusts cause and effect; we see a bad call, and then we live with it, instead of jump-cutting past the fallout. The soundtrack leans into period staples, but rather than presenting needle drops as elbow-nudges, the cues function like emotional timestamps. The music is less a punchline than a trigger. It’s easy to make the ‘80s loud; THIS TOO SHALL PASS makes them lived-in.

The film is at its best when it treats rule-breaking not as a genre obligation but as an experiment in identity. Simon’s religious upbringing is handled with restraint—no caricatures, no cheap sneers—so when he breaks out, the story carries context and cost. We understand what he’s pushing against without turning his family into faceless antagonists. That decision anchors the finale, which refuses to crown the weekend as triumph or tragedy; it lands somewhere more human, acknowledging that a weekend can both change nothing and change everything.

The film cares about friendship as an ecosystem. It observes how a joke can conceal panic, how one person’s big moment becomes another’s moment of solitude, and how apologies are offered without ever using the word. It respects the impulsive logic of being sixteen: the way a rumor can decide a route more than a map, the way a cashier’s tone can feel like a verdict, the way a song heard at the exact wrong time becomes the only thing you remember.

If the genre touchstones are easy to clock—road-trip checkboxes, mixtape vibes, the friend group splintering and re-connecting—the film earns its place among them by playing fair. It neither hammers nostalgia nor treats it like an excuse. And when it does reach for grace, it finds one that belongs to these kids rather than to the audience’s memory of other movies. The final passages don’t pretend that the weekend solved everything.

By the time the sun comes up, Simon hasn’t become someone new so much as someone less conditional. That isn’t the fireworks factory, but it’s real. THIS TOO SHALL PASS understands that most rites of passage end with the same chores waiting at home. The difference is how you carry yourself through them—and who walks back beside you.

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