Sundance ’26: ‘BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY’ Experiments with Identity and Fake Friends

We meet 14-year-old Sid Bookman (Ani Palmer) in a video chat room. It’s 2006, New Zealand, still deep in the dial-up age. Talking to a guy online, Sid says she’s 18 and claims her camera’s broken. It’s not. A chubby, shirtless 35-year-old wanks off on the other side. It’s these moments from the early internet that don’t exactly inspire nostalgia.

Big Girls Don’t Cry, from writer-director Paloma Schneideman, is a Kiwi coming-of-age story that deals with big emotions and the little moments that make them up. It’s a gentle, big-hearted movie that unfolds with the ease of a lackadaisical summer break. Well-paced and easy to swallow, it captures the aura of the era: the squirrelly chaos of a 2006 teenage house party, the Nokia text abbreviations, AIM chat convos, and the awkward beginnings of sexual awakening.

Sid is a bit sex-crazed, and quickly discovering that her interests may lie more with her own sex than the other. She’s harboring a couple of unspoken crushes, both on older blonde girls. Her dad, Leo (Noah Taylor, a performer often seen in bit parts but more welcomely substantive here), doesn’t give her the time of day. He’s as checked out as can be, and with her mum no longer in the picture, Sid is left with little in the way of support or role models.

Beyond her sexuality, Sid is also on the verge of exploring new friendships with a different crowd: mean girls. One beach day, she ingratiates herself with a pair of cliquey teen vixens by offering booze as a peace offering. This means short-shrifting her real BFF, Tia (Ngataitangirua Hita), in favor of the sad courtship with the popular, image-obsessed blonde Lana (Beatrix Rain Wolfe) and her equally empty sidekick, Andy (Emilie Boyle).

They may be cool, but they’re vacuous, mocking, and casually cruel. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Sid’s experiment with a new friend group mirrors her tentative exploration of queerness. She’s quiet and observant, a willing wallflower. She doesn’t yet understand her own sexuality — only that when she’s toying with herself, her thoughts drift to other girls. But she lacks the language, and perhaps the role models, to explain or accept that part of herself. To some, that makes her seem disingenuous, even dishonest.

Peer pressure becomes its own kind of initiation, where friendships are forged through shared mockery and casual cruelty. Sid’s slide into the group crowd is part of the messier process of figuring out which crowd she truly belongs to. Turns out that falling in with the wrong crowd is a crucial part of realizing what crowd you actually do want to be a part of.

Unsurprisingly, some moments along Sid’s path to self-discovery are deeply uncomfortable and cringy. A trio of older boys openly mock her to her face, and a beach hookup scene unfolds with a troubling mix of coercion and questionable consent. But through it all, Schneideman’s direction remains intimate, allowing the nuances of each moment to take shape without overpowering the work of her impressive young cast. With a strong ensemble and a big heart, it becomes clear this gentle tale about the long road to finding your genuine self is just the beginning.

CONCLUSION: Paloma Schneideman’s ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ is a tender and intimate New Zealand coming-of-age story circa 2006, following a young girl navigating where she belongs when she doesn’t quite fit anywhere, all while entering the early stages of queer self-discovery.