From the trailer, "The Starling Girl" promises a coming-of-age tale (entwined with religion) featuring a remarkably star-studded cast for a smaller project. Unfortunately, not even such an assemblage of acting talent can save "Starling Girl" from its utter lack of emotional depth beyond what is present at the surface level. For a very basic overview, "Starling Girl" tells the story of Jem (Eliza Scanlen), an adolescent girl who harbors a crush on youth pastor Owen (Lewis Pullman). When the crush becomes "something more"--and Jem's fundamentalist mother (Wrenn Schmidt) and depressive father (Jimmi Simpson) complicate things--Jem is pulled into a rabbit hole of new emotions and real-world complications. My ratings of 3-stars or less are usually pretty few and far between, but this one dropped below that threshold due to an utter lack of real emotional connection to the characters. All the scenarios are--on the surface--both plausible and harboring much dramatic weight, not none of it is mined properly. Every character and theme (like organized religion, for instance) is given a surface-level treatment and nothing more. Despite being interested in the actors, setting, and general content, I found myself fairly substantially bored 40 minutes in and it only drug out from there. "The Starling Girl" is also a film that understandably falls on the shoulders of Scanlen in the lead role. If viewers do not 100% identify with her thoughts/feelings, all is lost. While Scanlen herself seems up to that task, there are no supporting elements present. Great talents like Simpson and Schmidt are wasted in puzzling utilizations that hint at interesting material but don't take a step further with it. In the final reckoning, I wonder if perhaps "The Starling Girl" is a film that tries to be too many things and thus never took the time to focus on being really solid in any one aspect. Themes of coming-of-age, religion, grooming, depression, and isolationism (based on the setting) are certainly present, but from beginning to end I never really put my finger on what the overall experience was supposed to be about.

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