Afterschool (18)

Review by Philippa Bradnock

Cinema has always been fascinated with itself and the idea of watching and being watched. Afterschool explores these themes in the context of the age of cheap recording equipment and video sharing websites. It follows Rob (Miller), a quiet student at an exclusive US boarding school. He watches online amateur video clips of anything he can - laughing babies, school hallway fights, dead soldiers and disturbingly degrading porn. As part of a school video project, he accidentally films the deaths of popular older girls the Talbert twins from a drug overdose. The school requests a memorial video of the twins, which Rob is to oversee and edit.

There are obvious echoes of Gus Van Sant's Elephant in Afterschool. Elephant also focused on violent deaths in a school and featured photography and video games as student pursuits. But Van Sant's fluid camera movements showed the students as free agents in their surroundings. Afterschool director Antonio Campos favours static shots, which often partially obscure characters or action. Campos' students seem trapped and alienated, unable to move freely, and empty of the creative and empathetic desires with which Van Sant's teenagers brimmed.

This detachment sometimes makes for difficult viewing but, perhaps because of it, Afterschool succeeds in convincingly presenting the paradox of teenage life. Rob yearns for real, visceral experience and attempts to find it in his video clips, and later in the video tribute he creates. But the students also internalise almost all emotion. They are subdued with medication even as they are encouraged to talk about their problems and Rob's roommate, Dave (White), is permanently stoned.

The film also neatly exposes the hypocrisy of the school and its repackaging of grief and violence into more acceptable forms. The twins' parents' grief is raw and inexpressible and Dave's eventual reaction wordless and violent. In contrast the headmaster is calculatedly media-friendly, asking to start again when his tribute to the twins doesn't go quite as planned. The teachers' catchphrases about 'believ[ing] in the students of this school' are exposed as empty feel-good rhetoric, when presented alongside the introduction of heavy security checks and random drug tests. Even the understanding school counsellor proves untrustworthy.

The school is wilfully ignorant of the violence in its midst and also ignores the extreme sexualisation of the environment, much of which comes from watching others. Rob watches his teacher as she moves around the room and Rob and Amy (Timlin) video each other uneasily as they talk about their sexual history. Afterschool makes one wonder whether this sexualisation is different because of the availability of the kind of clips that Rob watches. Certainly some of his behaviour suggests that he has been influenced by them. But his position as watcher turns out not to be a privileged one – he is also watched, both by the audience and by others in the film.

Afterschool's artful framing and the characters' unresponsiveness create a slightly cold experience and the film has a narcotic pace which occasionally becomes dull. But this is an interesting and thought-provoking film, and makes an impressive debut feature from Campos.