Locarno 2026 Review: DESTROY ALL GIRLS, Freewheeling Skate-Punk Rebellion, With an Expiration Date

Erin Vassilopoulos’ freewheeling second feature Destroy All Girls premiered in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente.

The film follows Alex Martínez (Ani Mesa-Perez), who lives in Union City, New Jersey, where she works in a grocery store and helps care for her older brother Gabriel (Gil Perez-Abraham), a former competitive inline skater left severely disabled after an accident.

Their relationship is tender but encumbered by circumstances neither sibling chose. Alex loves Gabriel, but love has gradually been reorganized into obligation, while the future she once imagined has narrowed into a burdensome domestic present.

During one of her outings to skate and film other skaters, Alex encounters the Prospers, a wandering crew of inline street skaters, led by the charismatic Cameron (Dominic Bruce). Her camera soon gives her an opening into the otherwise male-dominated group. The crew hopes Alex’s footage might attract sponsorship and carry them toward professional competition in California.

For Alex, the change in social circles offers a sense of freedom from the claustrophobic situation at home, where she constantly bickers with her mother. The Prospers move from skate park to skate park, performing tricks and shooting footage, and Alex, without overthinking the situation, joins them as their skate-park hopping carries them beyond Manhattan.

Destroy All Girls begins as a social drama, establishing Alex’s domestic situation. As Vassilopoulos introduces more skating into the picture, it comes to symbolize liberation, and the film shifts into coming-of-age territory as Alex leaves the city with the Prospers.

Her spur-of-the-moment decision to abandon her problems and jump headfirst into a nationwide skating adventure, in the most carpe diem fashion possible, becomes an act of liberation within a makeshift community. The coming-of-age story soon turns into a gonzo road movie, with Alex hooking up with Cameron, which gives her a privileged position in the group.

The film also hints at greater fluidity in Alex’s sexuality, implying a fling with a woman she meets on the road. Alex soon learns that her spontaneous rebellion has consequences. She is fired from her job, and her voicemail fills with messages from her desperate mother.

Destroy All Girls has a loose, impressionistic narrative structure, with the skaters drifting from one park to another in an old-school hippie bus stocked with weed and beer. Alex initially enjoys the carelessness of an existence free from the ordinary responsibilities of young adulthood. But this blissful state has an expiration date, and the illusion of freedom begins to crack under the weight of the group’s internal hierarchies.

Cameron carries baggage of his own. He has a child with an ex-girlfriend who keeps asking for more money, even though the group has yet to earn anything from skating around the country.

Vassilopoulos’ sophomore feature has an almost documentary feel, with little conventional plotting and banter that frequently sounds improvised. Its freewheeling form never feels forced, particularly as Alex attempts to find a place within the Prospers’ male hierarchy.

Although her tomboyish presentation initially allows her to move easily among the skaters, it does not prevent the group from eventually reducing her to the role of Cameron’s “groupie.” In this respect, Destroy All Girls works best as an observation of group dynamics and the precarious position of the only young woman traveling with an otherwise all-male crew.

The film’s underlying narrative is archetypal, rather than specific to the socioeconomic conditions of any one generation. A character abandons family and responsibility to wander, only to discover that escape is temporary and a return inevitable. That storytelling places Destroy All Girls somewhere between Jan Vogel and Argyris Papadimitropoulos’ Wasted Youth and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, with a taste of Larry Clark in its attention to youth subculture.

Vassilopoulos’ approach, however, is less violent, less visually transgressive and ultimately more introspective. The questions surrounding Alex’s sexuality and identity remain underdeveloped, even though a fuller engagement with them might have distinguished the film from other variations on this familiar story and given it greater contemporary cultural relevance.

Hunter Zimny’s grainy 16mm cinematography lends the streets, apartments and skate parks a bruised physicality, while MiniDV footage captured from within the action introduces a rougher, more immediate register. Together, the formats summon the aesthetics of 1990s skate videos, giving Destroy All Girls a nostalgic appeal likely to resonate most strongly with viewers who grew up around, or retain an affinity for, the skating subculture.

Its setting may be distinctive, but its central realization recurs across generations:. Leaving everything behind can feel like freedom, but eventually the road curves back toward the responsibilities waiting at home.

The film screened earlier this month at the Locarno Film Festival.