Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Sabah Hensley This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Sam Sloan Without the hype and big financial backing movies such at this one often go unnoticed. I didn't know what to expect when I began watching this movie, but it wasn't long before I was drawn into it and the movie did something I look for movies to do for me - it made me feel. We see a young girl named Heidi who begins by doing a foolish thing, kissing her mother's boyfriend and it goes a little too far just when her mother walks in on them. We don't know what happens to her mother's boyfriend, but Heidi is pretty much forced to leave her mother's home with barely the clothes on her back. What follows is fairly predictable. It doesn't take a genius to know that the world is a hostile place for someone who is without a place to live, money, friends, family and with her only assets being her youth and good looks. As I watched, my heart went out to her and I wondered would even I have taken advantage of her and her situation being so vulnerable and desirable, or would I have taken her under my wing and tried to help her as the child she really was and needed, though some might argue didn't deserve because of her naiveté and penchant for getting into jams. I imagine many men, especially would be wondering the same thing. I really liked this movie and the acting was first rate and that surprised me given all the actors were total unknowns. If you want to see another movie as good as this one and similar to this, try the French movie called Vagabond.

Ken Knox There is a moment in Cate Shortland's "Somersault" where Joe (Sam Worthington), a surly and emotionally closed-off young man confused over the feelings he has for his kind-of girlfriend Heidi (Abbie Cornish), shows up at the home of an openly gay acquaintance of his mother's and—after downing several shots and spilling his guts to the older man—follows him into the hallway and makes an awkward pass at him by planting a drunken kiss on him. It's a surprising twist in both Joe's development as a character and the movie itself, but it's just one of several similarly unexpected--and unexplained--moments that define Shortland's oddly compelling drama about sexual coming-of-age. Joe is not the main character, nor does the film ever revisit his attempt at same-sex experimentation, and it's that vague attention to detail that is the most frustrating aspect of the movie. The story actually belongs to Heidi, an evidently emotionally troubled teenager with no concept of propriety who, for no apparent reason, decides to make a pass at her mother's hunky boyfriend. When mom comes home and catches the two kissing, she freaks, and Heidi runs away to a neighboring town. There, she shacks up in the small flat of an empathetic motel owner, gets a job at the local BP service station, and has sex with a string of guys. It is Joe, however, that most captivates her, and their awkward and strained attempts at forging a relationship are some of the most authentic captured on celluloid. Both of them are plagued by troubles that are never explored (apparently, Heidi once tried to commit suicide, as is evidenced by the scars on her wrists), but as they begin to open up to each other, the movie becomes more fascinating and oddly romantic. Shortland's direction is as languid as her ambling script (a bit more back story on the characters would have made them more three- dimensional), but her style is effective nonetheless, providing a showcase for the talents of both Worthington and Cornish, two young Aussie up-and-comers who appear to have big futures ahead of them. Grade: B.--Originally published in IN Los Angeles Magazine.

Inspiration-BG When I heard about this movie about a week ago i put it on my Netflix Que to watch. When it arrived i watched the film, and was disappointed at its execution. This films idea is excellent and needs to be addressed. The problem is that out main character is very undeveloped, and there is not one strong supporting role in the film. The story moved WAY to fast and the audience had no time what so ever to connect in an emotional way. The films pallet was nicely chosen, the blues how ever became way to over used, I like blue in a film but it needs to be balanced out with other tones a little less cool that blue such as white. All in all i Give this a 4/10.

noralee "Somersault" is a fresh spin on the in-over-their heads teenager movie, particularly the mixed-up city girl confusing the well-meaning country boy sub-genre. It is a sophisticated look at the motivations and resourcefulness of a teen age runaway. In her debut feature, writer/director Cate Shortland poignantly captures a girl's search for love and independence through sex. It isn't often that we see a film about tantalizing jail-bait from the girl's perspective. The town settings from Canberra to Jindabyne in New South Wales are unusual for Australian films we usually get to see in the U.S., providing an unusual meeting place for cold-weather tourists, the poor in their service industry, and farmers in from cattle stations.Abbie Cornish is a marvel in the central role. Looking startlingly like the young Nicole Kidman from her early Australian movies such as "Flirting", she morphs from coltish girl to sexual aggressor, even as it's clear she doesn't understand what she's getting herself into by thinking she can live out her fantasy in following one guy after another who she has met on the road. With the glimpses we get of her tumultuous inner world through a childish diary, "Heidi"s naiveté is palpably painful as Cornish projects her at different times in the film as being the character's actual 16 or pretending to be 20 when she thinks she can use sex as a manipulable tool without realizing what creepy situations can result. The subtlety of her performance extends to how differently she relates to men than women, particularly as she keeps seeking out mother figures. Sam Worthington is heartbreakingly sweet as equally naive, somewhat older "Joe", who clumsily becomes her protector and something more. I wasn't clear, though, about his back story with issues in his past (there's a lot of family secrets all around). The film also comments on bloke culture, including the ambiguous touches of homo-eroticism in male bonding.The scenes between these two marginalized young people are engrossing with their attraction and hesitation, as they clumsily imitate adult behavior that they can't really handle. Bouncing between maturity and immaturity, tenderness and aggression, they have enough trouble expressing and understanding their feelings without adding sex into the mixture.A side story with an autistic child leads to a way too didactic discussion about empathy and emotions, with flash cards no less.The cinematography had a lovely blue haze, but used fuzzy focus too often. I had some difficulty understanding the male dialogue among thick accents and low sound projection in the Time Square Theater, compounded by the restless male audience, up and down, in and out, slamming doors, who seemed mostly attracted to the film by Cornish's nude scenes. This film is a creative contrast to American indie films that tend to see young women on the cusp of adulthood more as victims as they experiment with their sexual power, such as "Blue Car" or "Hard Candy", or in commercial fare as innocents, like "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants", let alone male fantasy objects as in "American Beauty". A spate of recent non-American directors have focused on their impact on males, such as in "The Holy Girl (La Niña santa)", "À Tout de Suite (Right Now)", and "Lila Says (Lila dit ça)", with varying degrees of the success of this film in capturing their girl/woman confusion.