Premiering at Sundance 2024 yet assembled as if it were primed for the festival two or three decades earlier, Suncoast is the kind of broad, sunny Searchlight crowd-pleaser that aims to make up for its lack of originality with an abundance of heavily shoveled charm. It’s a strategy that just about works when the stakes are low and soapy but films in this subgenre ultimately demand a full-on assault to the heartstrings and the first-time writer-director Laura Chinn can’t quite muster enough genuine emotion to get us there, her so-so debut working best when investment is at its lowest.
It’s a busy patchwork of dynamics we loosely know from Searchlight indies all too well. There’s the coming-of-age narrative of a girl named Doris (played by Thandiwe Newton’s daughter Nico Parker) who is pushing herself out of the shadows at school to become more seen, making friends with the girls who had previously ignored her and flirting with the guy she’d never thought herself good enough for. There’s the family drama that sees her clash with a difficult mother (played by Laura Linney) who spends her time caring for a non-communicative son dying of cancer, letting their relationship suffer in the process. Then there’s the most superfluous element as Doris strikes an unlikely friendship with an eccentric grieving husband (Woody Harrelson) protesting outside the hospice where her brother is being cared for.
