Dead of Summer – Patience

By starrymag | June 29, 2016

By: Yana Grebenyuk

 

“Dead Of Summer” starts out with an older man playing the piano in a candle lit cabin. A group of men break in, asking where ”they” are, but the man just keeps playing the piano. We got back and forth between the man and a bunch of dead bodies floating in a lake.

 

Flash forward, our protagonist Amy (Elizabeth Lail) meets the fellow counselors before they board the bus. Joel, Alex, Cricket, Jessie, Blair and Jason are all reunited and they all seem to remember each other from summers past.

 

There’s another flashback, but this is more recent, with Amy arriving at a new school four months ago. Her mom tells her that she wants her to try more this time around because Amy must have struggled making friends at her old school.

 

The group arrives at Camp Stillwater where we meet Drew (Zelda Williams), the dark and brooding bad boy and Deb, the owner of the camp. Deb (Elizabeth Mitchell) is very excited about Camp Stillwater, but there’s a vibe around here that you can’t figure out off the bat.

 

Amy meets the gardener Dave (Darren Moore) who tells them all to get off his property. This doesn’t sit well with Amy, but everyone else just laughs him off and he disappears into the forest.

 

Flashback again to Amy getting partnered up with a girl named Margot (Morgan Taylor Campbell) in class. She doesn’t seem interested in getting to know Amy and no matter how hard she tries to be friendly, it just doesn’t work.

 

In the present time, Amy joins the rest of the gang at the campfire where Joel (Eli Goree) tells them a scary story. They hang out for a little while, but need more firewood so Amy ends up going to look for it in the dark forest. Everything is fine until she bumps into Dave again who warns her that she has to leave or it will get worse. He freaks her out, but he could really be on to something.

 

The next morning Joel is filming the sights when he sees Deb staring out her window. She doesn’t notice Joel, instead focusing on the lake and on the box that she has hidden in her room.

 

Meanwhile, Cricket (Amber Coney) and Jessie (Paulina Singer) share an awkward moment when they talk about how they drifted apart over the years. It looks like they were best friends, but both of them changed and Jessie doesn’t like that Cricket brought that up. Jessie decides to go off into the woods and finds a dead deer, something that couldn’t be done by a hunter because they left the carcass.

 

We flashback again to Amy not knowing where to sit at lunch on her first day. She tries to sit with Margot, which doesn’t go well when her friend challenges Amy. Margot’s friend wants Amy to give a girl that was nice to her before a card that calls her a pig. Amy doesn’t find it funny and moves to another table, but right after Margot approaches her with a much nicer attitude.

 

Present day has the group hanging out near the lake at night, with all of them running in for a swim. Cricket doesn’t take her shirt off, which we need to file away for later. And while Joel films Amy, he notices a figure appearing behind her. It disappears before she jumps into the water, but once she is swimming in the lake she sees a dead body in the water.

 

Two deputies appear to investigate the body, with young Deputy Garrett (Alberto Frezza) catching the eye of a few of the campers. Interestingly, he only seems to have eyes for Amy.

 

Amy goes to get water once they leave and ends up running into Garrett again. He is now off duty and decided to check Dave’s cabin in his free time. They talk about him going to the camp when he was younger and his reputation as a townie. They bond after he shares some sad stories about his past, telling her about his reputation as a townie and about the one year he was at the camp.

 

They reach the cabin where they discover a secret room with pictures and creepy artifacts. Before they can check it out, a fire starts in the cabin and Amy gets out thanks to Garrett. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get out in time so Amy takes an axe she finds on the floor and breaks him out right as the fire is getting stronger. While the deputies are trying to figure out why Dave died and why the fire started, we see Deb in the woods burying something as if nothing is wrong.

 

The gang goes to a cabin after the deputies leave again and Amy is chosen to go turn the lights back on after they go off. Alex (Ronen Rubinstein) volunteers to come with and once they are alone he tries to make a move on her. This reminds Amy of when Margot told her about the camp in the first place. Margot’s parents seem a little set in their ways, not letting their daughter do what she wants to; however, Margot is determined to get both her and Amy to Camp Stillwater that summer – no matter what her mother thinks.

 

Back in present time, Amy is about to kiss Alex back when she starts to hallucinate some pretty scary stuff. She thinks she sees Margot and that morphs into a group of beings crowding around her until Alex snaps her out of it. He talks her down and they return back to the group once the lights are back on.

 

The next morning, Garrett returns to the camp as he is wanting more answers about what he saw in Dave’s cabin. Deb is on edge with all the questions that Garrett still seems to have, even if they ruled everything out as an accident. Garrett and Amy meet again, with Amy hallucinating when they reach the lake. This time it’s all about Margot and the guilt she has for one particular night.

 

Amy remembers when Margot decided they would go to a party, even though Margot’s mother told her it will ruin her future. They have a lot of fun until the police show up and Margot freaks out. She’s worried that her mom is right, choosing to run away from the police by going through the second floor window. Unfortunately, Margot slips and Amy can’t get a good hold on her to save her. Margot falls to her death and that pushes Amy to decide to go to Camp Stillwater.

 

Garrett and Amy share another moment or two about the things they see, something that the camp must be responsible for. It looks like everyone will be haunted by their own dark pasts and secrets, one by one. Garrett and Jessie then share a moment, where we find out that she is the girlfriend that he told Amy about. Jessie changed so much that he didn’t recognize her at first, but when he did he looked overwhelmed. We would be too if we were suddenly caught in a love square.

 

Joel visits Deb again, but this time around she isn’t as nice about seeing him. She pulls her curtains shut and he looks disappointed, which is a whole other thing.

 

Drew goes to shower and we finally get a better glimpse at him. And that’s when the big reveal happens, Drew is actually transgender. That’s why no one recognized him in the beginning.

 

Cricket is alone in a cabin where she writes that she is a slut on one of the walls. This reminds us of the writing Alex saw on the wall in his cabin that talked about Cricket and her sexual experience with a guy. It looks like the rumors about Cricket that are written in the cabins must all come from her, but none of them are that positive.

 

The group ends up hanging out together and they decide to go back outside, but we manage to get a glimpse of the footage that Joel was showing them right before. The footage reveals some sort of presence at the lake that no one noticed when they were watching the footage. This means that whatever is happening at the camp didn’t stop with Dave’s death and like he said, it’s only going to get worse.