‘Extra Geography’ review: Two teen girls attempt to learn the language of love in uneven UK debut

Dir: Molly Manners. UK. 2025. 93mins

An English all-girls boarding school is the setting for this hit-and-miss coming-of-age tale of changing identities and shifting loyalties, adapted from a short story by Rose Tremain. Bafta-winning UK TV director Molly Manners makes a solid if uneven feature debut with this story of two teenage girls navigating unexpected changes to their friendship, moments of striking authenticity somewhat undercut by an overstretched narrative and a mannered, rather detached tone.

 Moments of striking authenticity somewhat undercut by an overstretched narrative 

Premiering in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic competition, the Film4, BFI and Screen Yorkshire-backed Extra Geography is fuelled by strong performances by newcomers Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan as 14-year-old besties Minna and Flic. The film will likely strike the strongest chord on home soil, and the presence of Jane Campion’s daughter Alice Englert in the cast, together with Manners’ previous TV work, which includes One Day and In My Skin, may help raise the film’s profile.

While the film is set in 2003, its timeframe is never made explicitly clear beyond a soundtrack populated with the likes of Shanks & Bigfoot’s ’Sweet Like Chocolate’. Life at St Jude’s, a prestigious English boarding school for girls (location unknown, although the film was shot in Yorkshire) is neatly established by cinematographer Andrew Commis in a concise opening montage of short skirts, muddy knees, bathroom tears and fiercely competitive lacrosse matches.

From the off, Year 10 students Minna and Flic are inseparable, their friendship assured – even though, as Minna often points out, Flic is ‘a scholarship girl’. Indeed, underneath their easy interactions, Clear digs into what’s sharp and ambitious about Minna; she’s confident in her own attractiveness, abilities and opportunities, and basks in the less-confident Flic’s obvious adoration.

Flic is so in thrall to her friend that she is happy to go along with Minna’s suggestion that they educate themselves in the art of romance by falling in love with the next person they see, who just happens to be their geography teacher, Ms Delavigne (Englert). Minna is sure she will be just as good as romance as she is at everything else, and so the pair embark on a charm offensive to win Ms Delavigne’s attention – and a coveted visit to her cabin for tea. (What exactly they will do when they get there remains unclear to them both). The arrival of a group of local boys for a drama production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream further muddies the waters, as Minna has her head turned in another direction.

The original short story is a concise five-minute read, told from the perspective of an older woman reflecting on her adolescence (and, apparently, based on author Tremain’s real-life experiences). In contrast, the screenplay by Miriam Battye (Succession, Dead Ringers) is set in the heady immediacy of the moment, told entirely from the point of view of these young women, and has perhaps lost some of the levity and nuance of its source material. It also feels stretched at times, the Shakespearean element, which was not in the original story, crowding rather than augmenting the central themes of love, loyalty and identity.

There is, however, something fresh and bracing in the interactions between Minna and Flic, the film given momentum by these two young women who cling to each other as they are buffeted by outside influences, and their seemingly rock-solid friendship starts to shift beneath their feet. The pair’s sexual innocence can feel a little over-egged, even taking into account the fact that the film is set in the pre-smart phone, pre-social media isolation of a boarding school. Yet, in their scenes together, Clear and Duggan spark beautifully, navigating their characters’ emotional highs and lows with a mix of caustic wit and often moving vulnerability.

As Ms Delavigne, the only major adult character in the whole piece, Englert has a far more difficult job; her character is painted as something of a dowdy, one-note middle-aged loner – perhaps because that’s how the girls saw her. And while Minna and Flic prove themselves to be effective, if rather clumsy, manipulators, Ms Delavigne is pushed more by the contrivances of the narrative into behaviours that don’t ring quite so true.