Crush (2022)
Film details
Comedy · Romance · Sammi Cohen · 1h 33min
Synopsis
When an aspiring young artist is forced to join her high school track team, she uses it as an opportunity to pursue the girl she's been harboring a long-time crush on. But she soon finds herself falling for an unexpected teammate and discovers what real love feels like.
Verdict
Normalizes homosexuality in teenagers within the format of a youth romantic comedy.
In-depth analysis
The film constructs a standard teen romantic comedy with a strategic twist: the protagonist discovers her attraction to another girl on the track team. The format is deliberate — it employs all the genre's codes (pop music, comedic situations, school social pressure) so that the adolescent viewer consumes the story as innocuous entertainment. Normalization operates precisely there: by presenting the lesbian relationship with the same narrative lightness as any heterosexual adolescent romance, the work eliminates all critical distance and presents as a fait accompli that sexual orientation is a natural discovery equivalent to finding a talent or a hobby. There is no questioning, no moral counterweight, no adult voice that introduces nuances. The synopsis itself confirms this by calling it 'real love' without further questions.
For parents, the risk is not in the visual crudeness — the film is light in form — but in the underlying message: that homosexuality in minors is a normal part of growth and should be celebrated. Not recommended for adolescents.