Film

Somersault

Name: Somersault
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 2004
Cast: Abbie Cornish, Sam Worthington, Lynette Curran, Erik Thomson, Nathaniel Dean

Coming-of-age

A raw, unflinching Australian drama about a teenager cast adrift after a sexual transgression, searching for stability and belonging in a small mountain town. Cineaste Cate Shortland's debut is visually stunning and emotionally bruising, tracking Heidi's fumbling attempts at survival and connection with the precision of someone who understands shame and need from the inside.

TMDb rating

3.2

If you liked this

Blue Valentine2010

A devastatingly intimate portrait of a relationship's collapse, told in fragments. Like Somersault, it finds unbearable honesty in the ordinary moments between two people who want connection but keep failing each other.

But The emotional exhaustion is relentless, and there's very little plot machinery to soften the ache. Watching it feels less like entertainment and more like witnessing something private.

Fish Tank2009

Andrea Arnold's film shares Shortland's gift for capturing how precarious young life can be, and how hunger—for escape, for love, for stability—can make you dangerous to yourself. Visceral and unsentimental.

But It's brutally bleak, and the protagonist's choices will frustrate some viewers. There's no redemptive arc, just the texture of getting by.

The Straight Story1999

Like Somersault, this is about someone in motion through rural space, finding grace in small interactions and the landscape around them. Quieter than you'd expect, and surprisingly moving about human need.

But Deceptively slow. If you're looking for conventional drama, you'll find it thin. It's more like a poem than a plot.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Somersault

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1976

Both films understand that the interior life—the small, unglamorous work of staying alive—is where the real drama lives. Both refuse to punch up their material with false stakes or conventional climax.

A three-hour Belgian masterpiece about a woman's daily routine—cooking, cleaning, accounting. What seems static becomes profound. It shares Somersault's interest in the texture of survival and how repetition contains the whole of a life.

But It is very long and deliberately boring as a formal strategy. You watch it in real time, which means you experience the tedium the protagonist does. That's the point, but it requires patience verging on endurance.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles poster

Dogville2003

Lars von Trier's stark exploration of vulnerability and exploitation in a small community has Somersault's unflinching eye for how isolation makes people cruel. The theatricality makes the ugliness somehow sharper.

But Deliberately austere and morally punishing. It's designed to provoke discomfort, and it succeeds so thoroughly that some will feel manipulated by it.

Take Shelter2011

Michael Shannon's portrait of a man trying to hold together a fragile life captures the same sense of mounting dread and the exhaustion of caring too much. Economical and devastating.

But It's deliberately ambiguous about what's real, which some find profound and others find frustrating. The pace is deliberate almost to the point of stillness.

Winter Song2023

Shot in the Australian winter with a similar mood to Somersault, this is about isolation and the tentative hope that can bloom in rural spaces. Understated and genuinely moving.

But It's very quiet and regional in its concerns. The pacing will feel glacial if you're not on its wavelength.

The Piano1993

Jane Campion's film about a woman's isolation and hunger for connection in an unwelcoming landscape shares Somersault's visual poetry and emotional directness. Holly Hunter's muteness makes her presence more powerful, not less.

But Some of the sexual content is disturbing and non-consensual. It's uneasy by design, which is part of the point but not everyone's idea of an evening.

Charlotte2017

An intimate character study about a young woman navigating vulnerability and desire. Quiet in register but not in emotional intensity, with the same gift for finding drama in ordinary spaces.

But Minimal plot and a downbeat trajectory may leave you feeling like you've spent time in someone else's sadness with no resolution to show for it.

Climax2018

Both use extraordinary cinematography and experimental structure to locate profound alienation in the body. Somersault is intimate and social; Climax is collective and nightmarish. Same engine, opposite temperatures.

Gaspar Noé's fractured horror-dance film uses sound design and spatial disorientation to convey psychological dissolution. Like Somersault, it's visually hypnotic and interested in how quickly stability can collapse under pressure, but in a completely different register.

But It's aggressively avant-garde and contains graphic imagery including sexual violence. The style is so pronounced that some find it more interesting as aesthetic provocation than as human drama.

You Can Count on Me2000

Both are interested in how people improvise family and belonging when the official version has failed them. Both understand that love and resentment can occupy the same space without cancelling each other out.

Kenneth Lonergan's screenplay about familial obligation and unmet need has Somersault's eye for how people hurt each other not out of malice but out of their own desperation. Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo are superb, and the emotional specificity is devastating.

But It's set in upstate New York and plays like a conventional indie drama, which might make you underestimate how painful it is. By the time you feel it, you're trapped inside it.