Girls Will Be Girls Review: A Himalayan Coming-of-Age With Real Bite

Is Girls Will Be Girls good?

Yes — this is one of the strongest coming-of-age debuts in recent memory. Shuchi Talati’s film holds a Critic Score of 100 and a Metascore of 79, with an Audience Score of 78, a Letterboxd rating of 3.7, and an IMDb rating of 7.0 — a spread that suggests critics were nearly unanimous while general audiences, understandably, found the material a little thornier to sit with. That gap isn’t a red flag; it’s a fair reflection of a film that deliberately makes viewers uncomfortable rather than reassured.

What is Girls Will Be Girls about?

It’s the story of a teenage girl whose sexual awakening gets tangled up with her mother’s own unresolved past. Set at a strict boarding school in the Himalayas, the film follows 16-year-old Mira as she starts to explore desire and romance for the first time, only for that fragile process to be complicated when her mother — newly arrived at the school — begins confronting feelings she buried long ago. Rather than keeping the focus solely on its teenage protagonist, the film widens its lens to treat the mother as a fully realized woman still working through her own thwarted rebellion, turning a familiar genre into something closer to a two-generation character study.

Should you watch Girls Will Be Girls?

Yes, particularly if you want a coming-of-age story that treats desire and shame with real complexity instead of tidy resolution. The nearly perfect critic reception and solidly positive marks from audiences and Letterboxd users point to a film that rewards patience — at 160 minutes, it takes its time, but that space is used to develop both Mira and her mother as equally flawed, equally sympathetic people. Viewers looking for a straightforward teen romance may find it slower and thornier than expected; viewers open to a more uncomfortable, layered take on adolescence should find it richly rewarding.

How does Girls Will Be Girls compare to Lady Bird?

Like Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, this film builds its coming-of-age story around the friction between a teenage girl and her mother, using that relationship as the emotional engine rather than a subplot. But where Lady Bird plays its mother-daughter tension largely for wry, generational comedy, Talati’s film pushes into more charged territory, making the mother an active participant in her own unresolved desire rather than simply an obstacle for her daughter to overcome. The result shares Lady Bird’s specificity of place and voice, but trades its warmth for something more unsettling and, ultimately, more daring.