Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard worked with Billy Bryk on Jesse Eisenberg’s 2022 debut feature When You Finish Saving the World, and apparently the two became good enough friends to write and direct a feature film together. Today’s film is their debut feature, Hell of a Summer, which debuted at 2023’s Toronto International Film Festival, and for some reason is just seeing the light of day now, in April 2025. And while I’ve certainly seen worse when it comes to actors making their directorial debuts, I was certainly less enthusiastic about Hell of a Summer than I expected to be. It’s a big mess, and very little works. However, there are some elements here that almost come together enough to suggest a potentially brighter future for the filmmaking duo.

Hell of a Summer follows 24-year-old Jason (Fred Hechinger) who is once again traveling to Camp Pineway for the summer, where he will be working as a summer camp counselor. He’s gone here for the summer for years and his mother is worried he’s not taking his future seriously. Once there, he struggles to connect with the teenage counselors and he’s suddenly feeling out of touch. Meanwhile, a masked killer starts to terrorize the summer camp and everyone’s a suspect and no one is safe.

The idea to combine the summer camp hangout movie and the slasher movie is certainly something that could work, but Wolfhard and Bryk’s screenplay is so unfocused and so poorly paced, this 88-minute runtime somehow feels endless. There are too many characters and none of them are likable, and most of them are shouting exposition at you constantly. You get the same vibes you may have seen in the late ‘90s-early ‘00s when every self-aware slasher wanted to copy the Scream franchise. This is trying to be smart and self aware, but it’s really not showing audiences anything they haven’t already seen. I kept hoping for the moment when this film would find its message or its point and that moment never came.

Fred Hechinger is a younger, more up-and-coming actor who I very much have enjoyed watching, and who has had a particularly good 2024. Between his scene-stealing turn in the fantastic indie Thelma, to his scenery-chewing villain role in Gladiator II, our guy has proven himself to be an actor with lots of promise and considerable range. I found Hechinger so annoying in this role it was almost off-putting. He’s supposed to essentially be our audience conduit into this world and the emotional core of this story. I just found his personality here grating and insufferable and almost impossible to connect with. I think that’s a matter that’s less the fault of the actor and more the screenplay, which isn’t giving him anything really substantial to work with. It kind of feels like nobody behaves like an actual human being in this film, but perhaps that’s more of a screenplay problem.

We have some exciting people in our supporting cast here, and everyone is stranded without any worthwhile material to work with. Aside from Wolfhard and Bryk themselves, we have D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, previously having made a strong impression in FX’s series Reservation Dogs, and Julia Quinn, who previously impressed in M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin. I also enjoyed the work of newcomers Krista Nazaire and Matthew Finlan, who I had not seen in anything before. Every performer here is working hard to add something – anything – to the mediocrity on display in the filmmaking here, but there’s only so much an actor can do without the writing to back them up.

Like I was saying, there is a way to combine the summer camp hangout movie and the slasher flick, but Hell of a Summer is not doing either of these particularly well. As a hangout movie, we’re spending time with these hideously insufferable people who learn nothing and do not evolve over the course of the story. And the film totally forgets what audiences come to see in the slasher genre. There are maybe two or three kill scenes that have no sense of life to them, and are very blandly executed. If we had some boldness to the brutality here, some creativity in the kills, that could save this whole movie. But instead, the film kind of shies away from any real horrific violence and I feel like for the film Wolfhard and Bryk were making, that is a mistake. And the reveal of who is the actual killer is a big shoulder-shrug.

So, unfortunately I can’t find much to recommend about Hell of a Summer. The pacing is weird, the humor doesn’t work, the slasher element is almost non-existent, and the film overall feels like a mass of wasted potential. There are glimmers of something better under the surface, but I could tell early on this wasn’t going to work for me and then it just kept not working for the remainder of the running time. I like Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk as performers, and maybe they have other better movie ideas in them, but this was not an auspicious filmmaking debut.

I feel like there’s a reason Hell of a Summer, after having spent a year and a half in scheduling limbo, is finally being dumped in theaters in early April. It’s not a strong enough release for the summer movie season and it’s not terrible enough to be dumped in January. It exists solely in this half-assed middle ground of mediocrity and it’s nothing you need to rush out to the multiplex for.