All This Panic

Ah, high school… A hell­ish time, fuelled by inse­cu­ri­ty, self-loathing, pim­ples and a fuck-tonne of home­work. It’s com­fort­ing to know that regard­less of whether you are a stag­ger­ing­ly beau­ti­ful teen queen with stacks of cash, or a bespec­ta­cled dun­geon mas­ter, every­one has prob­lems big and small. This is the sole take­away from Jen­ny Gage’s doc­u­men­tary, All This Pan­ic.

From the out­set, there’s a sense that Gage decid­ed to repli­cate the style of a Petra Collins pho­to­shoot in order to cre­ate a Girls spin-off. The younger (even more vapid and tedious) years. Which is not to say these sto­ries of pre­dom­i­nant­ly white, priv­i­leged high school girls in New York aren’t wor­thy of being told. It’s the how that’s the prob­lem. Even at 79 min­utes, the film feels mean­der­ing and exhaust­ing­ly disjointed.

The more seri­ous issues these girls face would be dif­fi­cult to deal with at any age – parental sui­cide attempts, self-harm, men­tal ill­ness, home­less­ness, sex­u­al­i­ty, race. And there are gen­uine­ly affect­ing moments in the film. Lena, the most engag­ing of girls, recounts how her father explic­it­ly told her he doesn’t have the will to live any­more. And yet this scene, as with many oth­ers, is washed over with sepia-hued soft focus and back­dropped by a sunset.

Some­thing like the 2016 com­ing-of-age com­e­dy The Edge of Sev­en­teen, though entire­ly fic­tion­al, feels authen­tic in its nuanced, awk­ward, hilar­i­ous, heart­break­ing por­tray­al of what it feels like to grow up. By com­par­i­son, it’s dif­fi­cult to find a rea­son to feel any­thing watch­ing All This Pan­ic. They say youth is wast­ed on the young, but these youths were wast­ed on this film.