Extra Geography: ‘a frothy, funny coming-of-ager’

Molly Manners directed four episodes of Netflix’s “One Day”, the hit adaptation of David Nicholls’ bestselling novel; now, she has made an impressive feature debut, said Tara O’Brady in The Irish Times.

“Extra Geography” is set in a boarding school in North Yorkshire in the early 2000s, and “follows two close friends (newcomers Marni Duggan and Galaxie Clear) “who decide that academic success is not enough”. They must also become “worldly”. So they assign themselves a project to fall in love, and alight upon their geography teacher (Alice Englert). However, a complication arises in the form of an interschool production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, which “brings boys into their previously closed world”, and tests the girls’ bond.

Adapted from a story by Rose Tremain, “the film treats adolescence as a nerve-racking rollercoaster of exaggerated stakes and cringe comedy, allowing both girls to be selfish, mean, insecure and, simultaneously, endearing”.

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A “frothy, funny coming-of-ager”, featuring “uncommonly good” performances from its two young stars, “Extra Geography” is quite simply “sublime”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. It has touches of the US high-school comedy “Booksmart”, with added class tension because we’re in the UK. The script contains plenty of “zingers”, but the ending is “bittersweet”.

The film “plots a safer route” than Tremain’s novel, in which the girls project “colonial fantasies of New Zealand onto their part-Maori teacher”, said Hanna Flint in Time Out. It’s a shame it detours around that rocky terrain but this barbed satire about female friendship and rivalry is still “a road worth taking”.