Big Girls Don’t Cry, a coming-of-age story from writer-director Paloma Schneideman, is your teenage years, distilled into a movie. For better or worse. The movie centers on 14-year-old Sid, a teenager trying to navigate the space between who she is, who she’s becoming, and who she wants to become, all while dealing with her own internalized homophobia.
Sounds familiar? It should. Pretty much everything about this movie should be familiar to anyone who’s been a teenager at some point, whether you are queer or not. There’s a universality to the experience that makes the entire thing work, because even if you can’t relate to her sexuality, you can absolutely relate to everything else.
The movie does a really great job at examining that moment in our lives where we don’t know who we are, so we end up trying different hobbies and sometimes even personalities as we would try on a new dress. We can be very different people from one day to the next as we try to figure out if we’re A, B, F, or a combination that no one else really embodies. That’s the good part of being a teenager, and it’s also the terrifying part.
And yes, that discovery sometimes comes with fear, especially for a queer teenager. Will my sister, or my childhood best friend, really like this new version of me—whoever she ends up being? If I push them away, I won’t ever have to find out if the answer is no.
It’s a silly notion, but it makes perfect sense in the mind of a teenager, and we would know, because we were once teenagers. In that respect, Big Girls Don’t Cry works perfectly. But as much as the movie excels as a coming-of-age tale, it doesn’t really do much to add to the conversation as a queer story.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad queer movie. There’s nothing wrong with the story Big Girls Don’t Cry is telling. And perhaps, in a way, the tender way the movie handles Sid’s issues with her queerness is something new. We all have to fight against our own internalized issues. But the overall themes are not. We’ve seen these stories before.
Ani Palmer ends up being a great part of the reason why the movie still works, even though it’s not in any way reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, you don’t have to. You just have to tell an honest story, with characters that feel authentic and actors who are engaging with the material in a way that feels honest.
Sure, there’s no real ending to the story of this teenager, just like there’s no real ending to any story about figuring out who you are. Because the problem with that is, there’s no ending to that journey. And though once you’re past your teenage years, it might get easier to separate the things you want from the things you don’t, and start crafting who you really want to be, the work doesn’t stop because neither does life. That’s just the way it is.
Big Girls Don’t Cry premiered at the Sundance 2026 Film Festival.
