My Summer of Love

My Summer of Love is a British drama centred on Mona, a restless sixteen-year-old living in a Yorkshire village with her older brother Phil, who has turned to born-again Christianity since leaving prison. Into her dull summer comes Tamsin, a wealthy, educated and cynical girl who has been suspended from her private boarding school. Though the two come from very different backgrounds, their mutual fascination grows into an intense, secretive friendship that slides toward romance and, eventually, something more dangerous, as the girls trade confidences about Phil's faith and Tamsin's adulterous father. What begins as shared happiness and a promise never to part becomes uneven ground, with one of them far more invested than the other.

Paweł Pawlikowski directed and co-wrote the film with Michael Wynne, and it sits second in his filmography, between The Stringer and Ida. Natalie Press plays Mona, Emily Blunt plays Tamsin, and Paddy Considine appears as Phil, with Dean Andrews, Michelle Byrne and Paul Antony-Barber in supporting roles. Tanya Seghatchian and Chris Collins produced for BBC Film, the UK Film Council and the Film Consortium. The film took about 1 million dollars worldwide, a modest return for an independent British production. Audiences are mildly positive on IMDb, where it holds 6.7 from roughly 23,000 votes, while the smaller TMDB sample gives 6.2 from 331 votes; critics were considerably warmer, averaging 7.6 from 92 reviews, so the film was better received by reviewers than by the wider public.