The Floaters (2025) [Movie Review]

The Floaters is what happens when somebody makes a summer camp comedy and actually likes the campers. Rachel Israel’s film drops a washed-out rock musician into a broke Jewish sleepaway camp, hands her the ten kids nobody else wants, and then does the hardest thing a movie like this can do: it makes every one of them a person.

Quick Take: The Weighted Verdict

Direct answer: The Floaters (2025) is a warm, funny, unusually specific ensemble comedy that earns its sentiment instead of assuming it. Jackie Tohn and Sarah Podemski anchor a friendship story that turns out to be the real spine of the movie, the misfit campers register as individuals rather than a category, and the climactic camper-written stage show actually delivers. It works in the most heavily grooved form in American comedy without ever feeling like a knockoff of it.

Who should see it: Anyone who went to sleepaway camp and never quite got over it, viewers who want contemporary Jewish American stories told in a register other than trauma, and comedy audiences who miss when this kind of mid-budget ensemble picture played theaters as a matter of course. Who can wait: Anyone who needs a comedy to surprise them structurally, and viewers who want their laughs mean.

Instead of collapsing The Floaters into a single number up front, here is how the pieces are weighted, ordered by how much each one drives the overall impression. The weight column reflects what actually matters for this specific movie, not a universal formula.

Factor	Weight	The Call
The Floaters Themselves	25%	The whole ballgame, and the film wins it. Ten outsider kids who read as ten distinct people rather than one lovable clump.
Tohn and Podemski	25%	The secret spine. What looks like a camp comedy is really a story about two women in their thirties quietly resenting each other for taking different roads.
Comedy and Screenplay	20%	Jokes that are written rather than improvised into existence, built on character instead of reference. The structure is familiar, and the film knows it.
Camp Daveed as a Place	15%	A camp with a maintenance problem, not a nostalgia filter. The production resists the golden-hour wash almost entirely.
The Songs and the Finale	15%	Load-bearing rather than decorative. The climax is a performance, so the original material has to land, and it does.

Bottom line in one sentence: A sincere, sharply cast, genuinely funny comedy that treats its misfits as characters instead of causes, and that has to be hunted down one screen at a time to be seen.

Fast facts for the all-consuming answer box:

• What it is: An ensemble comedy set at a Jewish sleepaway camp, from director Rachel Israel, released theatrically by Brainstorm Media.
• Who is in it: Jackie Tohn, Sarah Podemski, Aya Cash, Seth Green, Judah Lewis, Nina Bloomgarden, Jake Ryan, Steve Guttenberg, Jonathan Silverman, Jill Kargman, and Maxwell Jacob Friedman.
• Do I need to be Jewish to follow it? No. The Floaters is dense with cultural specificity and refuses to translate any of it, and that turns out to be a strength rather than a barrier.
• Is it appropriate for kids? The Floaters is unrated but broadly accessible, and plays well for families with teenagers.
• Runtime: Approximately 1 hour 41 minutes.
• Where can I see it? In limited release, expanding weekly through art house bookings, JCC theaters, and regional chains.

Nomi’s Last Resort

The setup is efficient and a little cruel, which is the correct way to start a comedy about a person who needs to be humbled.

Nomi, played by Jackie Tohn, gets thrown out of her rock band on the eve of a European tour. She is not a kid. She is old enough that this was supposed to be the thing that finally worked, and it did not, and there is no next one queued up behind it. Broke and humiliated, she takes a last-resort job from her childhood best friend Mara, played by Sarah Podemski, who now runs Camp Daveed, the Jewish sleepaway camp where the two of them grew up.

Mara has problems of her own. The septic system has failed, the camp is financially underwater, and the summer is going to determine whether Camp Daveed exists next year. She hands Nomi the floaters, the kids who do not slot into any bunk’s social order, and assigns her to direct their entry in a high stakes Maccabiah Games challenge against Camp Barak, the wealthy rival across the lake, run by Nomi and Mara’s old nemesis Daniel, played by Seth Green.

Nomi rejects the safe Fiddler on the Roof revival everybody is expecting and pushes the kids to write something original instead. This goes badly before it goes well, which you already knew, and The Floaters is not pretending otherwise.

What makes it work is that the movie is honest about Nomi being the problem for a while. She arrives at Camp Daveed with her ego fully intact and her judgment nowhere in sight, and The Floaters lets her be genuinely, consequentially wrong long enough for it to cost her something. Comedies about a screwup finding purpose usually rush that part. This one sits in it.

The Kids Who Do Not Fit Anywhere

Here is where The Floaters earns its score.

An ensemble comedy about outcast teenagers lives or dies on one question: do the outcasts read as individuals, or do they blur into a single lovable lump of misfit? The lump is the default. It is easier to write, easier to shoot, and it lets a film gesture at inclusion without doing the work of characterization. The Floaters does not take the shortcut. Judah Lewis, Nina Bloomgarden, Jake Ryan, Ben Krieger, Max Samuels, Jim Kaplan, Jacob Moskovitz, Thani Brant, Jillian Jordyn, and Bekah Zornosa are playing ten separate kids with ten separate and frequently incompatible reasons for not fitting in, and the screenplay gives each of them something to want.

That is not an accident of casting. Rachel Israel made Keep the Change, which won at Tribeca and cast autistic actors in a romantic comedy about autistic adults, and she followed it with Influenced. She has a documented interest in putting people onscreen who normally get handled as subject matter rather than as characters. The floaters in The Floaters are never a cause. The film never once invites you to feel good about yourself for tolerating them, and it never asks them to be wise or precious or quietly profound. They are teenagers. Several of them are irritating. The movie likes them anyway, which is a completely different transaction than pity.

The running joke underneath all of it, and the smartest structural choice in the screenplay, is that the adults supervising these kids are no better sorted out than the kids are. Nomi is a floater. Mara is a floater with a clipboard. The title works on everybody in the frame.

Tohn and Podemski Are the Actual Movie

Everyone is going to describe The Floaters as a camp comedy. Structurally it is a two-hander about a friendship, and that is the better movie hiding inside the logline.

Jackie Tohn is a working musician as well as a comic actor, and that matters enormously here. Nomi has to be good enough that the near-miss actually hurts, because a story about a failed musician collapses instantly if you suspect the character was never any good. Tohn can play, so the disappointment lands as fact rather than backstory. She also refuses to make Nomi ingratiating. There is a version of this performance that begs the audience for sympathy in the first ten minutes, and Tohn does not go anywhere near it.

Sarah Podemski has the harder and quieter assignment. Mara is the one who stayed, who built something, who is now watching it fail while her friend who left gets to swan back in and be the fun one. That is a resentment with twenty years of sediment under it, and Podemski plays it without ever letting Mara become the antagonist. The Floaters is careful about this. Neither woman is right. They took different roads out of the same childhood and have been quietly grading each other ever since, and the film treats that as the actual subject rather than an obstacle to the camp plot.

The scenes between them are where The Floaters is best, and they are the reason the ending works. The camp competition is the engine. The friendship is the point.

Is The Floaters Too Jewish for a General Audience?

No, and the question is worth answering directly because it is the thing people will ask.

The Floaters is loaded with cultural specificity that it flatly declines to explain. Ga-Ga, the kitchen mashgiach, Israeli folk dancing, the entire architecture of the Maccabiah Games. Nothing stops to translate itself. There is no outsider character installed to ask helpful questions on the audience’s behalf, which is the move a lesser version of this movie would have made in its first ten minutes.

Declining that move is why it works. Every good film about a subculture operates this way, and the ones that pause to explain are the ones that die. Specificity reads as texture even when it does not read as information, and an audience will happily accept that a world has rules it has not been told, as long as the people inside it behave as though the rules are real. The Floaters trusts that completely, and it is right to.

Israel did not go to Jewish summer camp. She has been open about it. She came to the material through the screenplay, credited to Brent Hoff and Andra Gordon and Amelia Brain, from a story by Hoff and the Korman siblings, Becky, Lily, and Shai, who also produced. The Kormans supply the lived experience and Israel supplies the outside eye, and The Floaters was shot at an actual Catskills camp rather than a dressed location, with Jewish actors in the Jewish roles. That division of labor is visible in the finished film in the best way: the detail is insider-accurate, and the framing is legible to anybody.

The Grown-Ups’ Table

The adult casting in The Floaters is a joke with a punchline that lands about four names in.

Steve Guttenberg is here. So is Jonathan Silverman. That is a very deliberate summoning of a specific era of Jewish American screen comedy, and putting those two in a movie about whether a camp tradition survives another generation is not subtle, but it is funny and it is thematically load-bearing rather than decorative.

Seth Green plays Daniel, the rival camp director, and gets the film’s most purely comic assignment as a man whose wealth has done nothing whatsoever for his personality. Aya Cash turns up. Jill Kargman turns up. Maxwell Jacob Friedman turns up, which a good share of readers will know from professional wrestling rather than from film, and who is deployed with more wit than a stunt casting usually gets.

Camp Daveed Looks Like a Place Where People Actually Live

Danny Vecchione shot The Floaters, Jordan Janota designed it, and Ava Hama did the costumes, and all three were working against the most obvious trap in the genre. Summer camp movies default to amber nostalgia lighting and period-agnostic production design that could be any year since 1979, because the form is fundamentally about memory and memory has a color grade.

The Floaters mostly refuses. It is set now, at a camp that is broke, with a septic system that does not work, and the craft team keeps the place looking maintained rather than remembered. Camp Daveed has peeling paint and a budget problem and cabins that were last updated during a different administration. Shooting at a real Catskills camp does a great deal of that work, but the restraint in the grade is a choice, and it is the right one. A film about whether an institution survives should not look like it is already being mourned.

The Songs Are Not the Soundtrack, They Are the Plot

The music package on The Floaters is unusually substantial for an independent comedy at this budget, and it has to be.

Erik Desiderio and Jacob Bloomfield-Misrach share score credit, Matthew Hearon-Smith supervised, and The Floaters carries original songs from Dan Bern and Orit Shimoni, from Jackie Tohn with Dan Henig, from Taali, from Bloomfield-Misrach, and from What Does It Eat, alongside a needle-drop bench including Shira Margalit, Kosha Dillz, Tony Shevlin, and Cayucas. Maud Arnold choreographed.

That last credit is the one to watch, because the climax of The Floaters is a camper-written stage performance. The original songs are not underscore. They are the third act. If the finale does not play, nothing preceding it holds, and every emotional beat the film has been building collapses into a shrug.

It plays. The performance sequence is staged with real care, the material is written to sound like something teenagers would actually produce rather than like professional songwriting slumming, and the film resists the temptation to make the kids suddenly, implausibly great. That restraint is what makes it land.

Where The Floaters Falls Short

The Floaters is working in one of the most heavily grooved forms in American comedy. Rival camps, a competition, a misfit troupe, a final performance. At the level of plot architecture, everything that happens in The Floaters is something you have seen happen before, and the film is not attempting to subvert any of it. Its ambitions are entirely in the texture, which is a legitimate and frequently superior way to make a comedy, but it does mean the third act arrives roughly where you expect it to. Viewers who need a comedy to do something structurally surprising will find this one comfortable in a way they may read as slack.

Is The Floaters Worth Seeing in Theaters?

Yes, and more than usual, because this is a comedy calibrated for a room.

The Floaters is built on the kind of humor that compounds when other people are laughing at it, and its emotional beats are pitched at an audience experiencing them together. It is also, practically speaking, a film that may be difficult to see later. There is no announced home video plan, no streaming date, and no franchise apparatus to keep it visible. Movies with this release profile historically survive on physical media or they do not survive at all.

The catch is finding a screen. The Floaters opened July 10 at the Quad in New York and expanded July 17 to the Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Town Center 5 in Los Angeles, with Q&A appearances from cast and producers at both. A Toronto screening at the Prosserman JCC with Sarah Podemski is set for July 22. The July 24 wave adds AMC Hoffman in Alexandria, the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, Teaneck Cinemas in New Jersey, and Harkins Shea in Scottsdale. July 31 brings West Newton Cinema outside Boston, the Sedona Film Festival theaters, and the Regal Majestic in Silver Spring for the Maryland premiere. A Minneapolis JCC date has been postponed and will be rescheduled.

Film Specifications

Detail	Information
Title	The Floaters
Year	2026
Director	Rachel Israel
Screenplay	Brent Hoff, Andra Gordon, Amelia Brain
Story	Becky Korman, Lily Korman, Shai Korman, Brent Hoff
Producers	Becky Korman, Lily Korman, Shai Korman, Andra Gordon
Co-Producers	Amelia Brain, Nick Page, Aaron Levine
Production Companies	K180 Studios, Athena Pictures
Distributor	Brainstorm Media, in partnership with Reboot
Principal Cast	Jackie Tohn, Sarah Podemski, Aya Cash, Seth Green, Judah Lewis, Nina Bloomgarden, Jake Ryan, Steve Guttenberg, Jonathan Silverman, Jill Kargman, Maxwell Jacob Friedman, Dan Ahdoot, Ben Krieger, Max Samuels, Jim Kaplan, Jacob Moskovitz, Thani Brant, Jillian Jordyn, Bekah Zornosa
Cinematography	Danny Vecchione
Production Design	Jordan Janota
Costume Design	Ava Hama
Editor	Chelsea Taylor
Casting	Stephanie Holbrook, CSA
Choreographer	Maud Arnold
Music	Erik Desiderio, Jacob Bloomfield-Misrach
Music Supervisor	Matthew Hearon-Smith
Filming Location	Catskills, New York
Runtime	Approximately 101 minutes (1 hour 41 minutes)
MPA Rating	Not rated
Festival Premiere	Bentonville Film Festival, 2025
US Theatrical Release	July 10, 2026

Disc Specifications are not yet available. The Floaters is currently in its theatrical window. This section will be updated with the full home video technical breakdown once a physical release is confirmed.

Looking Ahead to the Home Release

The outlook here is less certain than it would be for a studio title, and that is worth saying plainly rather than burying.

There is no announced 4K UHD, Blu-ray, or digital date for The Floaters. That is normal for a film two weeks into a limited theatrical run, but the release profile introduces real risk. A movie playing this way has no streaming algorithm behind it, no franchise to keep it visible, and a theatrical footprint made of scattered one-week engagements rather than a wide release with a long tail. Titles in this position historically depend on physical media for their survival, and plenty of them never get a disc at all.

If a release does materialize, the technical demands are modest. The Floaters was shot digitally on contemporary equipment and does not present the restoration or element-condition questions that dominate catalog coverage. What would matter for collectors is the supplement package: the Q&A recordings from the theatrical run, the Woodstock and Bentonville festival material, and above all the original songs, which deserve isolated presentation given how much narrative weight they carry.

A full technical teardown, extras rundown, and revised weighted verdict will follow the moment a disc is in hand.

The Verdict

The Floaters had no obligation to be this careful.

A movie with this premise could have coasted. The misfit camp comedy comes with a set of prefabricated parts, and audiences will accept them assembled in almost any order. Instead Rachel Israel and her cast built something with actual joints: ten kids who are distinct people, two women whose friendship carries twenty years of unexamined grievance, a world rendered with enough specificity that it never once feels researched, and a finale that has to work as both a plot resolution and a piece of music, and manages it.

It is not a surprising movie. The Floaters lands where you expect a film like The Floaters to land, and anybody looking for formal invention should look elsewhere. But the sincerity is earned rather than declared, which is the entire difference between this and a greeting card, and the laughs are built out of character rather than reference. In a summer where the theatrical business is increasingly a choice between spectacle and nothing, a modest, funny, well-made comedy about people finding their bunk is not a small thing.

Go find a screen. It is going to be harder than it should be, and it is worth the trouble.

The Floaters is playing in select theaters now, with additional markets opening through the summer.