Crush Movie: Hulu’s new sapphic teen romance

Last week, Hulu released a new coming of age sapphic film, Crush. And baby, we gotta tell you: it’s cuuuuutteeeeeee. 

Paige (Rowan Blanchard) is your average run-of-the-mill high school lesbian. She’s had a crush on Gabriella (Isabella Ferreira) since forever, who, as it turns out, is newly single. Gabriella is on the track team, and also gay, and is like so popular. Paige is an art nerd and definitely out of Gabriella’s league… or is she? 

Someone has been going around painting murals on school property in secret. No one knows who the artist is, but somehow the finger ends up getting pointed in Paige’s direction. She swears that she isn’t the artist, and in an effort to avoid suspension, Paige vows to the Principal to learn the identity of the artist as soon as possible. 

If Paige can’t uncover the identity of the artist, the Principal will definitely suspend her. A suspension will mean that Paige will be ineligible for a summer program at CalArts so finding the culprit becomes priority number one. 

Meanwhile, Paige seems to think the answer is on the track team. Despite being a terrible athlete, Paige fan-dangles her way onto the team. Not only will this allow her to sleuth out the artist, but this also means that she gets to spend more time with Gabriella up close and personal. Coach Murray (Aasif Mandvi) puts AJ (Auli’i Cravalho) in charge of training Paige. AJ is Gabriella’s fraternal twin sister, and she also happens to be bisexual. She’s nothing like Gabriella though (in appearance or in personality) and Paige wonders if maybe she judged AJ too prematurely. 

As time goes on, Paige isn’t really any closer to finding out who the artist is, but she is starting to think she has a crush on the wrong sister. The more time Paige spends with AJ, the more she realizes just how much she likes AJ. When AJ kisses Paige, AJ doesn’t know that Paige had already previously locked lips with her twin. Excited that AJ seems to return her affections, Paige doesn’t share this information with her either. It’s a bad move on Paige’s part because when AJ actually finds out that Gabriella kissed Paige first, all hell breaks loose. 

AJ feels hurt and betrayed that she didn’t know Paige had already locked lips with her sister. AJ always feels like she is in her sister’s shadow, so this tidbit of information does horrible things for her sister’s complex. Paige tries really hard to explain the situation to AJ, but AJ isn’t having it. In a very John Hughes-esque fashion, Paige decides theatrics might be the best way to make AJ see her side of things. It’s all very lovely and these high school idiots had us cooing at the television like morons!

It’s a teen, high school rom-com so of course, there is drama. What there isn’t though, is homophobia. No one in this film is closeted. No one in this film is agonizing over their sexuality. Folks are not bullying other folks for being gay or queer. There is no trauma from bigoted parents or classmates. These kids are queer and it’s perfectly and utterly normalized. It’s rare and so refreshing to see queer kids existing happily as the world moves on around them. 

Perhaps that is because there are so many queer folks involved in the making of this film. The director and the writers are queer, and Rowan Blanchard and Auli’i Cravalho are queer as well. Representation matters, and who better to tell queer stories than queer people themselves? If nothing else, this authenticity shines through in Crush like a breath of fresh air. 

The only downside is that Crush errs on the side of predictability. While it’s lovely and cute and wholesome, we knew pretty early on that AJ was actually the artist in question (yeah, she drops that bombshell when she finds out that Paige kissed her sister). We also knew the second we met Gabriella, that Paige wasn’t going to end up with her. And we knew AJ would eventually get over herself and she and Paige would end up together. So yeah, very predictable, but we’ll take it. 

We’re not likely to stream it over and over, but we’re happy we watched it. Queer kids deserve stories that aren’t cloaked in trauma all the time. Queer kids deserve to see other queer people being happy on screens. And Crush achieves this masterfully. 

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Crush is available to stream on Hulu now. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all queer stuff!