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Afterschool (2008)

Director: Antonio Campos

Time Out rating

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2 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

Flaunting a sense of misanthropy that makes Michael Haneke look like Tex Avery, Antonio Campos’s chilling second feature (his follow-up to 2005’s girl-sells-virginity-on-eBay diversion, ‘Buy It Now’) is both admirably ambitious and repellent. It concerns YouTube-fixated prep school outcast Rob (newcomer Ezra Miller), who skulks between classes, assemblies, the lunchroom and his dorm, continually bullied by his peers.

While casually filming exposition shots for an AV club project, he accidentally captures the death of two well-liked twin girls as they overdose on tainted cocaine. He walks over and cradles one of them in his arms. You wonder, is he consoling her or choking her? Campos then contrasts Rob’s eerily nonchalant reaction to the tragedy with the hysterical mourning and after-the-fact anti-drugs campaigning around him.

Adopting the detached aesthetic of a homemade online video – right down to the needlessly elongated takes, muffled soundtrack, flickering autofocus and awkward angles (either very low or very high) – Campos cleverly shapes the action to mimic the stock characteristics of those kinds of clips. There are numerous lengthy scenes of kids socialising or filing down corridors that abruptly break out into violence, all of which looks as if they were filmed by a surveillance camera.

The film has a lot to say about the effect of technology on teenage interaction, how schools repress individuality and how sexual awakening causes, rather than relieves, teenage angst. It comes unstuck when, like Haneke’s ‘Benny’s Video’, it demands that we naively accept that video imagery can provoke copycat antisocial behaviour from the viewer. The remainder of the film is brave, intelligent and disconcerting, but this doesn’t wash.

Author: David Jenkins 2009-08-18 13:22:01

Time Out London issue 2035, 20-26 August 2009

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User reviews of this film

fb said...

Posted on Aug 28 2009 13:57 By a comfortable margin, this was the worst film I've seen this year. It doesn't surprise me that the TO reviewer loved it ; this film was made for critics to admire, not for the public to enjoy. The characters aren't so much detached from the viewer as marooned in another universe : I can honestly say I didn't come even close to experiencing a single flicker of empathy or feeling for any of these sad creations. The contempt displayed by Campos for us, the viewer, supercedes anything I can remember. Even during the worst films I've endured in recent years ("Heartbeat Detector" and "Antichrist" spring instantly to mind), at least I felt that there was a vision, however poorly realised, that the maker wanted to present to the audience. Here, I saw (and felt) nothing. And please, don't breathe the name "Haneke" in the same time zone as Campos : the former makes films of immense subtlety and intelligence (in the case of 'Hidden', a genuine contender for best film of the decade); the latter just leaves calling-cards. Soulless, boring and hateful ; you have been warned.

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Schipper said...

Posted on Oct 24 2008 04:47 I agree with the reviewer, certainly one of the most impressive films in this year's festival and one of the best feature debuts in a long time. It beautifully, though painfully, portrays and highlights some of the problems facing our generation. Like Campos' other (shorter) films, it is intense, very interesting, and not one to miss.

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