Sundance 2026 Review: CHASING SUMMER, A Cut Above the Usual Coming Home Comedy-Drama
Directed by Josephine Decker, Iliza Shlesinger wrote and stars in the comedy-drama, alongside Garrett Wareing, Lola Tung, Cassidy Freeman, Tom Welling, and Megan Mullally.
By one unofficial count (mine), the Hallmark Channel has produced roughly 10K films over its existence. Among them, a tried-and-true premise: the big-city dweller returning home for the first time in decades, discovering she likes and/or loves small-town life, and reconnecting with an old lover. Cue credits.
Similarly, Chasing Summer revolves around a thirty-something woman, Jamie (Iliza Shlesinger), newly single and between disaster relief gigs, returning to her hometown, Dallas, Texas, mostly against her will, and revisiting not just old friends, if any, but old, unresolved traumas.
It’s not just the typically dysfunctional family for Jamie. It’s worse, at least in her mind: The failed high school relationship with onetime jock, Chase (Tom Welling), and the rumors that circulated about an unplanned pregnancy (Jamie’s), his public rejection of their relationship, and the ostracism that followed.
Two decades later, and while the world has moved on, Jamie hasn’t. Despite her protestations, part of her is still stuck in high school and her semi-antagonist relationship with her mother, Layanne (Megan Mullally), and her older sister, Marissa (Cassidy Freeman), who wrecked Jamie’s car along with her life (not Jamie’s life, Marissa’s). Fraught as her relationship with her mother and Marissa might be, though, Jamie’s effectively stuck until she’s activated for another relief effort, this time in Indonesia.
As these familiar stories tend to go, Jamie, of course, runs into Chase. Now older, grayer, but still ruggedly handsome, his reentry in Jamie’s life naturally sparks all kinds of conflicting, conflicted feelings in his high-school girlfriend. As he’s now married to a younger woman and the father of two, Jamie keeps her distance, choosing self-control over self-indulgence. It’s the first and, most likely, the last time Jamie does.
Pulled into working for Marissa at the latter’s semi-rundown skating rink, Jamie puts her construction and engineering skills in disaster relief to good use, helping with necessary repairs (but not the roof [foreshading alert]); befriends a twenty-something employee, Harper (Lola Tung, The Summer I Turned Pretty); and at the latter’s insistence, joins her for a nighttime pool party where, not coincidentally Jamie meets the perpetually shirtless, classically handsome Colby (Garrett Wareing).
Despite their twenty-year age difference, Jamie enters into an undefined romantic relationship with Colby. For her, it’s a summer dalliance, a palette cleanser to clear her mind and body before she heads to Indonesia. To the undeniably young, naive, and besotted Colby, though, Jamie might be something more, quite possibly the love of his (young) life, setting up a not unexpected conflict between wants and needs on both sides of the dyad, not to mention the unspoken, but no less real, judgments society places on relationships between older women and younger men.
At least, though, the sex, onscreen and off, qualifies by any metric as “hot,” mostly thanks to director Josephine Decker (The Sky Is Everywhere, Shirley, Madeline’s Madeline). Best known for her formal experimentations in narrative form, Decker leans heavily into a more conventional approach here, emphasizing an unshowy, straightforward, minimalist approach where character, dialogue, and performance take precedence over narrative form, thematic complexity, or visual invention.
An experienced stand-up comedian with an impressive seven streaming specials to her name (six on Netflix, one recently on Prime Video), Shlesinger ably handles the demands of the role. To be fair, Shlesinger wrote and produced Chasing Summer as a starring vehicle for herself, but that doesn’t undercut the lively, lived-in performance she gives as Jamie.
Shlesinger imbues Jamie with a welcome complexity. She’s messy, can’t decide what and who she wants at a given moment, let alone for the next month, year, or the rest of her life. In that, Shlesinger makes Jamie not just a relatable character, but a cut above the one-dimensional characters typical of similarly-premised cable fare.
Chasing Summer premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
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