Robert (Ezra Miller), the central character of writer-director Antonio Campos's feature debut, Afterschool, is an alienated sophomore at a posh New York-area boarding school. "I think I might be a bad person," he tells his mother on the phone. A few days later, while working on an extracurricular video project, he witnesses and records a tragic incident in a school hallway, and his response brings up further questions about his character and his relationship to the often-disturbing images that constantly bombard him.
Campos's film has polarized audiences on the festival circuit, and it's easy to see why. It's a challenging film, both formally and thematically, and it's genuinely disturbing. There are some brilliant moments that cunningly play on audience expectations: a boy and girl playfully struggle for control of a video camera, but we sense something more serious at stake; we hear some kids watching Robert's video of the aforementioned horrific incident, and make a terrifyingly incorrect assumption about its provenance. Afterschool has been compared to Gus Van Sant's Elephant. They're both high school tragedies with a self-conscious visual aesthetic (long takes, slowly moving camera), so it seems like a natural comparison, but while Harris Savides's camera smoothly tracks along with Elephant's kids, Afterschool DP Jody Lee Lipes pans right past them, often coming to rest with the characters cut off by the frame. These gorgeously off-kilter widescreen images are blurred together with consumer-quality video. Campos's script is similarly more knotty and unsettled than Van Sant's. Point-of-view is frequently called into question, as are assumptions about what is genuine. "Are they seriously doing this?" one witness is heard remarking while a hallway altercation is recorded on cell phones. Campos may not get all the credit he deserves for his film's ambition because it's a milieu that feels very familiar -- over-mediated (and over-medicated), bored privileged high school kids wreak havoc -- but Afterschool is unusually thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Many contemporary arthouse filmmakers have ventured into the kind of content associated with pornography and horror, but Campos is more than a provocateur. His depiction of sex, drugs, violence, and death at a bucolic upscale boarding school is harrowing and haunting because he is interested in a genuine interrogation of contemporary adolescence, in all its exasperating complexity.