Tall Girl

Standing Tall in a World Built for Someone Else

I’ve seen this movie before. Not Tall Girl specifically—though I’ve now seen that too—but the story it’s telling. The awkward teen, the cruel jokes, the slow-burn romance that arrives just in time to teach our heroine that what makes her different is also what makes her special.

It’s a formula so familiar it’s practically a genre unto itself, the cinematic equivalent of a warm blanket on a cold night. And yet, here I am, two days after watching Tall Girl, still turning it over in my mind. Not because it’s groundbreaking, but because it’s so earnest—so determined to make its small, specific point that it forgets to ask whether the point is worth making in the first place.

Jodi (Ava Michelle) is sixteen and six foot one, a height that would be unremarkable in a WNBA player but in a high school sophomore is treated like a deformity. She slumps, she hides, she endures the same tired jokes about the weather being “up there” with her. The film’s opening minutes are a montage of these humiliations: Jodi ducking under doorframes, her knees pressed against the underside of her desk, a group of popular girls snickering as she walks by.

It’s all very She’s All That, if She’s All That were directed by someone who’d never seen a John Hughes movie but had read a lot of YA novel summaries.

The problem isn’t that Tall Girl is bad—though, at a SensCritique rating of 4.3/10, it’s certainly not winning any awards. The problem is that it’s fine. It’s the kind of fine that makes you forget you’re watching a movie until the next musical cue kicks in to remind you.

Nzingha Stewart, making her feature directorial debut, seems content to let the script (by Sam Wolfson) coast on autopilot, trusting that the sheer familiarity of the premise will carry it through. And in a way, it does. There’s comfort in watching a story where the moral is already written on the chalkboard before the first bell rings.

But comfort isn’t the same as insight.

Take the film’s central romance, which arrives in the form of Stig (Luke Eisner), a Swedish exchange student who’s tall enough to look Jodi in the eye. Their meet-cute is so by-the-book it might as well have come with a publisher’s stamp: Jodi, humiliated after a disastrous school dance, flees to the soccer field, where Stig is practicing alone. He’s new, he’s foreign, he’s different—and, crucially, he doesn’t see her height as a punchline.