The Edge of Seventeen feels like a movie written for the girls who have felt misunderstood for so long in their lives. It captures the type of loneliness that shows up in high school, when everything looks fine from the outside but on the inside it feels like everything is falling apart. Nadine is not the quirky, fun girl we often see in coming-of-age movies. She is angry, awkward, insecure, sometimes dramatic, and relatable. She feels everything too deeply, to the point where she does not know how to handle any of it, which is exactly what seventeen feels like for me and for many other teenage girls. The film does not try to make her the perfect main character. She is often insufferable, thinks she is smarter than everyone else, and she is messy with an interesting backstory. That is what makes her relatable.

What makes the movie hit the hardest is the grief she carries from losing her father. Nadine’s dad dies suddenly while driving with her, and her life changes in an instant. Her anger is not random. It is the grief from her dad dying that fuels it. Her loneliness comes from growing up without the person who made her feel safe and seen. The people around her are often confused about her behavior and do not know how to handle it, so the distance grows.

Another relatable part is Nadine’s depression. As someone who has suffered from depression and loves watching movies and TV shows, I have often noticed that depression is portrayed as characters who are constantly sad and feel nothing else, especially in teen characters. With Nadine, we see different emotions and how she copes with her life while living with depression.

In contrast, her mother represents the opposite of what Nadine needs. She does not try to understand her daughter, and she does not show empathy or give grace for what Nadine is going through. Living with her parents and her brother, who is the star athlete, makes everything feel worse. Nadine’s brother is her bane of existence. She says he is the reason she has been dealt the unfairness of life. She is jealous of his perfect life, his popularity, and him being the jock. She does not realize that he may also be imperfect and have feelings too.

When Darian starts seeing Nadine’s best friend, it becomes Nadine’s last straw. Since her father’s death, Krista was the only person she felt she could have to herself without anyone interfering. Now that her brother is with Krista, it feels like the last thing she had for herself has been taken from her.

This only makes Nadine’s feelings of unworthiness worse. No love from her mother. No father, who was the only one who understood her. Barely any friends. Ongoing mental health issues. It becomes the final thing that pushes her over the edge.

Then there is Nick. When people are going through a lot, they often look for an escape through crushes and by creating a version of someone in their minds who is not real. To us, it is obvious Nick is bad news. But to Nadine, if Nick liked her, she would finally feel the self-worth she has been searching for her whole life. That ends badly. Then Erwin appears. He is not the type of boy she thought she needed. Popular, partier, got the girls. That is what she thought she needed because she saw what her brother had and assumed that meant he was thriving. She thought that was the missing piece. But she eventually realizes that she did not need any of that to feel whole.

In the end, Nadine realizes that the love she was searching for was not something she had to chase in her mother, her brother, or boys. What she needed was trust in who she was and someone who saw her for who she was instead of who she thought she had to be. She learns that people in her life can care about her even if they do not show it in the way she wants, and that she is not as alone as she always believed. That understanding does not magically fix everything, but it gives her space to grow into the person that she has always been meant to be.