Girls Girls Girls review – fun but derivative Finnish three-hander

Alli Haapasalo’s Girls Girls Girls has also been going by Girl Picture in English-language territories but, if you had to pick just one, it’s the former title that best sums up this raucous but rather derivative teen dramedy. As befits the triple repetition of the title, this is a real three-hander, following three teenage girls across three weeks of their lives in the Finnish winter looking for love, athletic success, and good sex, all of which prove elusive in their own ways.

If there is a lead amidst this mostly equal ensemble, it is Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff), self-possessed and performatively cynical, already living on her own, apart from her terrible mother, who has essentially forgotten all about Mimmi following her second marriage and new young child. Listless and disappointed and ready to take that disappointment out on anyone she encounters, Mimmi’s life is upended when she meets Emma (Linneia Leino), a figure skater whose chosen passion has, until now, utterly consumed her life.

There’s an instant spark between the pair, and it’s not long before they’re dating, though the exact durability of their love is kept as a bit of a thorny question – each is using the other as an escape from their respective selves and home lives, which inevitably leads to conflict. Meanwhile, completing the trio is Ronkko (Eleonoora Kauhanen), Mimmi’s best friend whose fruitless quest for an orgasm has left her disillusioned with the idea of romance as a whole.

All three girls give compelling performances and share a chemistry that immediately grounds you in their various relationships – it’s particularly easy to imagine years of friendship between Mimmi and Ronkko – and it’s this chemistry that keeps Girls Girls Girls going even when the plot stumbles. The inevitable nadir of the Mimmi-Emma relationship, when it does come, strains credulity, the pair suddenly acting less like teenagers and more like long-jaded adults, and there’s a lack of originality that detracts from the lived-in acting.

The shades of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart are obvious – the two films even share a needle drop of Perfume Genius’s “Slip Away” in the midst of a boisterous party – and comparisons between the two generally don’t flatter Haapasalo’s film. Ronkko’s story, also, often seems lifted almost wholesale from the Sex Education subplot involving Aimee-Lou Wood’s Amy (Kauhanen even sometimes seems styled after this character). The coming-of-age story is hard to be particularly novel in, granted, but this familiarity just makes the world here feel a bit less real.

Happily, though, Haapasolo finds a more unique angle through her setting. The near-perpetual dark of the Finnish winter lends Girls Girls Girls a bleakly beautiful visual world all its own, while the less uptight Scandi social norms keep some of the typical American parental or legal dramas at bay. Of the two Finnish coming-of-agers that have released in UK cinemas in the last few weeks (one of 2022’s odder cinematic mini-trends), Girls Girls Girls doesn’t have the sort of staying power that Hatching did, but it’s still a lot of fun in the moment, even if it very rarely surprises.

Girls Girls Girls is released in UK cinemas on 30 September.