Never has there been a more classic and ironic genre relationship than what exists between a coming-of-age story and religious awakening (or reckoning, as it were). The archetypal teenager — rebellious, love-sick, yearning for social acceptance — cannot exist in gentle company with the structure of the church, an emblem of self-control where love is conditional and acceptance rests on self-restriction to a mysterious yet rigid ruleset.
Perhaps we might now view this seemingly contradictory storyline as an essentially expected part of the religion-teenager plot. The likes of Lady Bird (2017), Sing Street (2016), or Yes, God, Yes (2019) have recently explored the oppressive influence of religious environments upon teenagers and their newfound sexuality, but these stories often prioritize other themes: a mother-daughter relationship, in Lady Bird; music and freedom in Sing Street; sexual curiosity in Yes, God, Yes. Where Lemonade Blessing (2025) enters this genre, and finds its strength, are the moments it knits together religion with awkward love in harmony, not in exploring the ways they diverge in difference, but rather where they resonate when set together.
Instead of suggesting that one’s teenage years are inextricably different from the religious environment in which they are reared, so completely opposed that they cannot be reconciled, like two liquids that can’t quite emulsify, director Chris Merola’s debut film relishes in the awkward and blunted similarities of teenagehood and faith. In short, the Catholic school where the film takes place is not solely a repressive setting that isolates its atheist, ungovernable teenage characters; it’s the film’s essential institution that our characters also want to believe can be good.
As expected, the film wields the trademark angst of teenage curiosity to broaden the self-seriousness of the Catholic-school environment. Reckless pranks and sloppy kisses (the sound effects, my goodness) meet classroom conversations about chastity. Both scenes, however, adopt an absurdist tone, ultimately translating as uncomfortable. Neither do the pranks act as true relief from the draconian school environment, and the classes aren’t insignificant indoctrinations.
For what underlines both — what’s absent from other films like it, what makes Lemonade Blessing fresh — is a more direct, conflicted engagement with religion itself on the teenager’s terms. We meet our main character, John (Jake Ryan), on his first day at a private Catholic high school. His mother, Mary (Jeanine Serralles), is a devout Christian, divorced from John’s passive and faithless father Pete (Todd Gearheart), and often overbearingly attentive to John’s purity as he dates Lilith (Skye Alyssa Friedman), a girl at St. Dimna’s.
Unlike some of his counterparts, John believes in God, and he takes the misguided diatribes of his teachers very seriously. Ryan, expertly cast, plays John’s faith with a barefaced, worried longing. Like his characters in Asteroid City and Eighth Grade, his physicality lends an inimitable perfection to his character: his mouth resolute with anxiety, his body nervous and hesitating.
A brilliant Friedman embodies an equally original, fiery Lilith, temptation in her name. While she might seem to be John’s escape from this solemn life concerned with sin, her commands that he piss on a communion wafer or burn a bible are not the hilarious, soul-freeing activities they pose to be. The urgent conflict that John feels while performing these acts (alongside the incompatible timid desire and shame he feels when they kiss or touch) emphasizes the contradictions inherent to John’s character; he is both a teenager in love for the first time and learning what his faith can be without the influence of another person’s direction.
The recognition that one is the sum of others’ parts, that our environmental influences and parental upbringings happen not in a vacuum but influence our view of the world we encounter them, is a recognition John vocalizes late in the film. He suffers without self-knowledge — the lack of a “me part,” as he puts it, a straightforward and desolate confession. All the film’s wondrous or comedic quirks suddenly fracture with this confrontation, and the scene grows excruciating and empathetic with gloom. Suddenly, the anger John feels toward his father for his lack of belief or his frustrations with his mother’s religious-informed rules adopt a melancholy quality: What does it matter that we are good if we cannot decide independently what that goodness feels like?
Other stories might see John’s growth occur in spite of Mary—a Lady Bird-esque rejection of a mother’s rules—or because of Lilith, diminishing her identity to a crush that serves John’s self-exploration. Instead, Lemonade Blessing sees all its characters yearn for that “me part,” a journey incomplete but beautifully rendered at the film’s quiet concluding scene.
For a genre setting so oddly familiar to contemporary films like it, Lemonade Blessing at last succinctly identifies the very idea that links the two: “Is there no end to the things we have to learn?” Indeed, that quote comes from a book that Lilith gives John toward the end of the movie. She tells him earlier in the film that she wants to be an artist, and the bottom of the chapter is bedecked with illustrations she’s etched into the soft paper: dancing skeletons, fluttering fairies in black, red, and blue ink. The sentiment — wistful, earnest, a little anxious, hinging wide open to another world — could not be more fitting.
Review Courtesy of Arleigh Rodgers
Feature Image Courtesy of Submarine Entertainment