Parents' Guide to

Girl Asleep

By Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 14+

Quirky coming-of-age fantasy has cursing, sex.

Movie NR 2016 77 minutes
Girl Asleep Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

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

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What's the Story?

At 14, the heroine of GIRL ASLEEP. Greta (Bethany Whitmore), is struggling at a new school. She's immediately targeted by passive-aggressive mean-girl triplets, whose words are friendly but whose actions are threatening. She's also befriended by Elliot (Harrison Feldman), an oddball who is reassuringly comfortable in his skin. Her overly-protective parents compound Greta's normal adolescent anxiety by fretting about her need to come out of her shell. They force an unwanted 15th birthday party on her, push her into a pink dress, and paint makeup on her face. At the party, filled with dancing teenagers she doesn't know, the triplets verbally attack her and Elliot pledges his love for her, all of which sends her into a nightmarish nap revolving around the recovery of a prized music box from her childhood. By the time she wakes up, she seems to have a better idea of who she wants to be.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

Director Rosemary Myers and writer Matthew Whittet throw elements from Alice in Wonderland and Beetlejuice at the screen and seem to hope that what sticks will make some kind of sense. Girl Asleep goes out of its way to be cute, with actors in Viking costumes, chicken outfits, and slimy ghoulish get-ups. It's as if such silliness might make transiting from childhood to adulthood easier to handle for both teenagers and audiences. You want to root for Greta but something as simple as understanding what kind of person she is remains unknowable based on the information the movie provides. At first Greta seems shy, awkward, and unhappy, someone who slouches along and can't walk away from witch-like classmates who clearly are out to get her. Then she inexplicably transforms -- at the sound of birthday party music -- into a wickedly expert line dancer. After the triplets are devastatingly mean to her, she runs from them and is inexplicably devastatingly mean to Elliott, the one person who has treated her well. How? Why? Up to that point the dilemma was whether she was clinging to little-girlhood or stepping into adulthood, not whether she was undergoing a personality transplant. The movie is stylized and arch, complete with colorful impish characters emerging from the woods whenever Greta plays her music box, but it takes a long time for the different threads of fantasy and reality to come together.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the difficulties of meeting the challenges of puberty and the years after. How do you think parents can help kids as they go through the physical and emotional changes that come in adolescence? How does Girl Asleep address puberty?

  • Do you think it helps a teenager to know that hormonal changes in the body can cause mood changes? Does more information about the universality of the changes kids go through help make the changes easier?

  • The movie suggests that Greta sees her father as an enemy who is just making her situation worse, even though she understands that he's just trying to help. Do you think parent-child relations would generally improve if parents and kids took more time to listen to each other?

Movie Details

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