After­school

With a vis­cer­al min­i­mal­ist style, After­school is a scream in the face of the Amer­i­can indie scene; a fuck you to the MTV aes­thet­ic that for so long has per­son­i­fied main­stream youth cul­ture. An open­ing viral mêlée poignant­ly sets up the film’s yo-yoing emo­tion­al insta­bil­i­ty, while encap­su­lat­ing the internet’s capac­i­ty to nour­ish human perversions.

Assault­ed by graph­ic scenes of sex­u­al deprav­i­ty you can’t escape a per­son­al recog­ni­tion of such mor­bid obser­va­tion. Not lit­er­al­ly, per­haps. But the idea that we have allowed the dot­com phe­nom­e­non to stim­u­late such social ills is clear from the outset.

This is not so much a film for the YouTube gen­er­a­tion as it is about it. Chan­nelling his own fetishisms through the film’s cen­tral char­ac­ter, Robert (Miller) – a prep school sopho­more with a pen­chant for dig­i­tal debauch­ery – direc­tor Anto­nio Cam­pos exam­ines the dark­er side of our innate fas­ci­na­tion with human interaction.

Dur­ing an audio-visu­al assign­ment Robert acci­den­tal­ly cap­tures a tragedy that throws the entire school into para­noid dis­ar­ray. The ensu­ing social com­men­tary is a stark cau­tion­ary tale, com­pas­sion­ate and cold at the same time.

In fit­ting con­trast to the lim­it­less expanse of the inter­net, After­school is inti­mate and claus­tro­pho­bic. Here in, how­ev­er, lie the films tri­umphs and short­com­ings. Through a sta­t­ic lens Cam­pos observes his sub­ject with an unflinch­ing eye, which gives the char­ac­ters depth and real­ism, but he doesn’t quite do enough to make you care. The young film­mak­er has tak­en lengthy notes from the Lar­ry Clark and Gus Van Sant schools of ado­les­cent angst, you feel, but he still has a lot to learn from these esteemed auteurs.

At times this is dif­fi­cult, drain­ing view­ing. A pre­dom­i­nant­ly young cast car­ry the script well, but there is just too lit­tle left unsaid when the cred­its role. There’s a dis­com­fort here too; an aware­ness that the director’s voyeuris­tic gaze tran­scends the nor­mal­ly secure space of the frame, eeri­ly switch­ing focus onto the audi­ence. With a lin­ger­ing and often awk­ward style, After­school is ambi­tious but ulti­mate­ly lacklustre.