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Parents' Guide to

18 Presents

By Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 14+

Italian tearjerker has some language, mature themes.

Movie NR 2020 115 minutes
18 Presents Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

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Is It Any Good?

Our review:
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This film achieves a difficult goal, creating a plausible alternate reality that fosters empathy in a self pitying teen. Meeting your own dead mother can do that. The dream that intercuts through the film is so real and believable that it ultimately affects the dead mother, too. Fantasy and real-life are skillfully intertwined, as Elisa is the driver who hits Anna, and that accident triggers the dream that brings the exasperating, drunken teen into the life of a pregnant cancer patient. Plus, Elisa has just received the diagnosis, so she has a lot on her mind, yet miserable as she is, she's still kind enough to bring the injured girl to her home for first aid.

To 18 Presents' credit, Elisa is no saintly maternal figure -- she's irritable, short-tempered, and distracted, and Anna's lying and evasiveness annoy the older woman. In the early minutes of the dream sequence, the audience can't help but wonder where this overlap of past and present can possibly lead, but the stories are neatly dovetailed as the story ends.

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