Girls Learning to Be Seen, and to See

MOVIE REVIEW
Weightless (Vægtløs)
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Genre: Drama, Coming-of-Age
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 37m
Director(s): Emilie Thalund
Writer(s): Marianne Lentz
Cast: Marie Helweg Augustsen, Ella Paaske, Joachim Fjelstrup, Jessica Dinnage
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 San Sebastian Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: This film explores topics and subject matter that may be incredibly difficult to watch and process. It’s not an easy watch, but it's a reality that feels true to the world. WEIGHTLESS finds tension in ordinary moments: a glance across a field, a joke that lands too sharply when you already feel too much. Set at a summer health camp bordered by forest and sea, the film follows fifteen-year-old Lea as she attempts to change her body and, more so, the way she inhabits her own life. That aim sounds simple; the execution is anything but. The camp’s routines—measured portions, group activities, quiet hours—promise control. What the program can’t regulate is attention, and the film understands that attention can be as intoxicating, as painful, and as formative as any number on a chart.

Lea’s new roommate, Sasha, is the kind of girl who seems to move through the world without asking permission. It’s not that she’s reckless; it’s that she carries herself like someone who believes she’s allowed to be. For Lea, that confidence is both a beacon and a threat. The contrast between them isn’t treated as a simple binary of shy versus bold. Instead, the story shows how admiration can coexist with envy, how closeness can sharpen insecurity even as it offers comfort. Their early scenes together—choosing clothes, whispering about boys, making decisions about food in front of each other—capture the unspoken negotiations of teenage friendship with uncomfortable accuracy.

Everything changes when Lea’s attention is fixed on Rune, a camp instructor who notices her as well. The film doesn’t sensationalize this. It also doesn’t minimize it. Rune’s interest is framed in the way a teen might experience it: as confirmation that the work of being seen is finally paying off. That framing is the point. WEIGHTLESS is interested in how a young person places desire onto the closest available narrative, even if that story isn’t built for her safety. By staying on Lea’s perspective, the film puts the audience inside the intensity of firsts— first moment of complicity, first fear that you’re in deeper than you can explain to a friend.

Marie Helweg Augustsen plays Lea with a guarded directness that suits the character. She doesn’t scream her emotions; she tries to manage them. You see the math happen on her face—whether to eat, whether to laugh, whether to tell Sasha what just happened, whether to treat Rune’s attention like a secret or a prize. Ella Paaske’s Sasha is more than a foil; she’s a kid with her own private ledger of vulnerabilities and wants. The friction between them never feels like a plot device; it feels genuine and authentic. It’s what happens when two people—each in the process of deciding who they are—compete for the same limited oxygen.

Joachim Fjelstrup’s Rune is calibrated carefully. He’s charismatic and practiced at warmth, the sort of adult young people are drawn to because he seems to see them. The film resists turning him into a villain. That restraint is effective because it forces a harder conversation: the danger isn’t only predatory intent; it’s the imbalance itself. Set against a camp designed to monitor bodies and behaviors, every boundary violation lands. The institution promises care, structure, and guardrails. When an authority figure steps outside those guardrails, the breach feels like a failure of the entire system, not only a single man’s choice.

Emilie Thalund’s direction favors close quarters and the small stakes that grow into large ones. She lets conversations breathe long enough to turn. A misread expression becomes an argument. A touch that could be dismissed as nothing becomes the only thing you can think about. The style supports the subject. Rather than cut away when scenes get awkward, the camera lingers, making space for the kind of silence that teens fill with decisions they aren’t ready to make. The result is a series of everyday escalations that feel painfully plausible.

As a coming-of-age story, the film’s strength is its refusal to moralize. Lea is not punished for wanting to be wanted. She is also not rescued by a lecture. Instead, she learns—partly through Sasha, partly through consequence—what it means to define your own boundaries before someone else describes them for you. The story understands the double bind for girls at this age: you’re told to be confident, but someone will call you arrogant; to defend yourself, but not to make a scene; to be desirable, but not too much. WEIGHTLESS articulates that binds without turning it into a thesis. It stays human-sized.

Jessica Dinnage, in a key supporting turn, adds nuance as an adult who reads the room better than most and understands that protection sometimes means believing a story the first time you hear it. Her presence contributes to one of the film’s quiet theses: good adults create conditions where kids don’t have to turn mistakes into identities.

WEIGHTLESS stays with you because it respects how high the stakes feel when you’re fifteen and how real the outcomes can be when adults don’t carry their share of responsibility. It’s a story about bodies, yes, but more precisely about ownership—of desire, of friendship, of the stories you tell yourself to survive a place that measures you by surface changes. By the time summer ends, Lea hasn’t solved herself; she has, however, moved closer to being able to speak for herself. That’s not a small arc. It’s the kind that sets the terms for everything to come.

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[photo courtesy of SNOWGLOBE FILMS]

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