Metacritic reviews

If the film is tender, it’s merciless at the same time.

Eliza Hittman's second feature is very much the work of a filmmaker with her own distinctive voice, combining moody poetry with textural sensuality to evoke the dangerous recklessness that often accompanies sexual discovery.

Writer-director Eliza Hittman has a sensitive ear for the way adolescents reveal themselves through evasion: It’s a tension crucial to this anxious, tactile, profoundly sad study of a young man’s journey of sexual self-discovery and self-betrayal.

With an energetic set of young actors liberated by Hittman’s jittery naturalism, the movie remains a gripping drama throughout — a combination that speaks to the director’s emerging aesthetic.

As a hyper-focused, dream-like portrait of a teenager grappling with both the conditions of his upbringing and a newfound identity, Beach Rats feels invigorating at very turn.

Beach Rats is a captivating character study and one that feels vital.

Beach Rats has an experiential, almost docudrama aesthetic whose lived-in authenticity is in keeping with that of the film as a whole.

Fate is a blunt instrument here. Yet you still wind up asking for more depth from the characters for whom Hittman is asking you to feel something.

Hittman (It Felt Like Love) turns out to be a conventional storyteller; despite her evocative styling and Dickinson’s surprisingly assured lead performance, her sophomore feature remains confined in monotonous, psychologically shallow coming-of-age-drama indiedom.

Beach Rats is most compelling when it puts a self-aware focus on Harris Dickinson’s sculpted male figure.