Afterschool (2008) User Reviews

Can't decide

[jcslawyer · 6/10 · 21 September 2020]

I really can say I don't think I liked this. But it's not necessarily for the same reasons some are giving for similar dislike. I didn't like it because, despite the mind-numbingly slow pacing, I still sat through it until the end.

I went to film school (legit), and I hate films that are well aware they're of that " independent" variety. Unfortunately, you can't just use that moniker and expect everyone to forgive your film for being pretentious or boring.

Yes, this movie had several boring scenes. Unnecessarily boring. Don't try to find art, it's boring. I don't feel that long, single shots with heads cut out of the picture to be edgy or unique. I find it as forced art. Trying to show you have a way of breaking from traditional cinematography. I got news...it doesn't always work. This film is evidence.

The acting was pretty good, so i will say the characters really played their parts well. I felt what Rob was feeling because he's talented and did what he could with his part. Same with some of the others. That being said, I think the director had too many things he wanted to squeeze into one film. Perhaps this would've been better as a limited series.

You can't give us a compelling plot only to make us crave the real aftermath we believed we were entitled to. The director makes us wait and gives us a tiny little steak at the end as a final, disappointing meal.

There was a lot that could've done to make this film better. Develop characters better. We get it....teens, depression, isolation, discovery...bla bla bla. But not all are pathetic, confused worms.

Run-time...if you're not planning on delivering some kind of denouement, then go for a quicker Hollywood ending so we don't sit up late writing reviews on how we wasted time.

Stick with one story. Don't try to start sublots and abandon them because you can't remember where you're going. You're the storyteller. You're the one who takes us on the journey.

You're all wondering why I gave it a 6? I'm not sure....can't decide.

Good for discussions but never reaches the heart. It's too mechanical and copied from other masterpieces

[Rodrigo_Amaro · 7/10 · 2 October 2013]

The daily routine of a boarding school spirals out of control and shifts to new policies after the death of two students by drug overdose in one of the many corridors of the place. And it was all videotaped by another student, Robert (Ezra Miller), who was using his camera for a school project. The story, actually, begins with him - a typical teenager, just a little more lonely than the usual barely talking to his roommate and constantly spending his days on the internet watching porn or school fight videos. Connect those events and you have a figure formed, a bomb waiting to explode. The movie's concern is in seeing how Robert will react with this tragedy while continuing with his project (now a memorial tribute for the dead girls), classes and involvement with his classmates.

So, it denounces the internet in a large scale and stays contrived while criticizing reality, real people and their sometimes useless values. Deals with real and poignant themes but the characters aren't so real, specially when you see the now familiar faces and voices of Miller and Michael Stuhlbarg. Good actors here and elsewhere but since the director is trying an almost documentary kind of film their performances get in the way. The themes explored were great, the presentation and the choices made were what killed its potential. It's a suffocating experience. It's right for the movie but that at no point cannot take the pleasure of the viewing.

Director Antonio Campos uses of static images that represent the voyeurish act of seeing things very distantly, rejecting close-ups and movements. It's the vision of the kid of sees everything from a distance, the girls he can't reach present on the net videos, and also the ones he couldn't save because he was in a state of shock (we're fooled into this until a certain moment). Furthermore, it's slow and problematic in the sound department - and since I didn't have captions for it a few things were gathered with the help of IMDb boards. That's what the director tries to convey (it could be) but to me it was lazy filmmaking hacking from masters like Haneke and Van Sant, trying to be a higher (and updated) variation of "Benny's Video" with "Elephant". Fails on both accounts. It's too mechanical.

Why does it always have to follow through doubtful actions? Why it has to be inconclusive or misleading or going in several directions? And the ending? A real betrayal that almost destroyed the film. I saw film critics dissing films because the final image killed the experience and shifts the movie to an unexpected and unpleasant degree, and I've never understood much of that. Now I know. It didn't kill my enjoyment but I must recognize that it was very cheap.

I liked "Afterschool" because when it wasn't trying to be pretentious (and it is) it offered valid criticisms about adults negligence while dealing with kids and it's an intelligent and psychological radiography on today's youth and all of its problems. Extremely manipulative and quite deceiving towards its final moments but gotta admit Mr. Campos managed to build tension in all scenes even the ones you give less importance like when the headmaster complains about Robert's expressionless video.

Some people look at this as a critique of the America post 9/11, and there's plenty of sustainable elements to confirm such view. I don't buy all that much but that can make your view something extra if you look carefully. Mindblowing. My message to the hipsters who believe this is one of the 10 best of the past decade: relax yourselves because there's better out there. The director's technique is poorly employed here. It works with other directors because they know what they're doing and probably they're not copying a style, they're making a tribute and using a bit of their own craft. "Afterschool" is simply a copy and paste. Good movie, far from great. 7/10

"Afterschool" is a two-hour block cinematic period of mediocrity

[meeza · 7/10 · 24 October 2010]

I am going to take you to "Afterschool"!!! OK, maybe after reading my pun-infested movie review, you might think of it more as puntention (I mean detention), and think that I have no class. But please just swim with these school of puns for a little while. "Afterschool" is a dark, quirky and semi-interesting film about an isolated prep-school teen named Rob who witnesses fatal drug overdoses of preppie female twins while working on an audio/visual school club project. Therefore, he is able to gather video footage of the twins' deaths. Rob is traumatized from the experience, and has difficulty coping with it. Rob's roommate is Dave, a cocky & arrogant bully who manipulates Rob on a daily basis and may or may not had a hand in the cause of the twin overdoses. Mr. Burke is the school director who is more concerned about the image of the school and its funders then of the ordeals and stress that teenagers go through. Amy is Rob's student partner in the audio-visual club and this Amy might be aiming for some Roboco**. Writer-Director Antonio Campos did develop an intriguing narrative on teenage angst, trauma, and insecurity; however, the immensely slow pace was more of an afterschool exercise of futility. Hey, I am down with slow pacing films, but Campos was too much of a "campesino" on the doldrums that hamper a slow-paced movie. His scribe was not a screenplayer valedictorian classic, but it did warrant a passing grade. I would not say it is Hollywood Miller Time yet for this young actor, but Ezra Miller's starring performance as Rob was a credible one even though it was a bit too monotone for my taste. Michael Stuhlbarg, of "A Serious Man", was superb as the self-centered school director Mr. Burke; Stuhlbarg is one seriously good actor that will probably garner a few Oscar nominations in his future. The rest of the supporting acting of "Afterschool", primarily comprised of teen actors, is not really worth mentioning, it's a D=Needs Improvement in my gradebook. "Afterschool" does barely make the grade, but it does not graduate itself to teenage movie genre superiority. *** Average

Mercury Vapor

[tieman64 · 7 November 2010]

"I think I may not be a good person." - Robert

Antonio Campos directs "Afterschool", an ambitious film which owes a little bit too much to the works of Haneke, Kubrick and Dumont.

The plot: at a private boarding school, an alienated teenager (Robert) watches as two older girls die due to the ingestion of drugs contaminated with rat poison. Rather than call for help, Robert simply walks over to the girls and watches as they pass away. This is all caught on a video camera, though as Robert's back is turned to the camera we don't see him suffocating to death (or does he?) one of the girls.

The camera itself was present simply because Robert was shooting a school project, which he later abandons in favour for making a video memorial of the girls who died.

Due to the presence of drugs on campus, as well as the deaths of the two girls, the school puts in place a harsh, disciplinary policy. Robert's video memorial is itself censored for being too probing and curious, rather than one dimentionally commemorative of the dead girls. The film then ends with two scenes. One in which children receive pills from a school nurse, and another in which Robert is in a library being spied on by an invisible camera.

The film uses a variety of distancing effects, none of which resonate. In the hands of the directors I previously mentioned, these techniques work, but Campos is a novice and his attempts at forcing a sense of Brechtian distance seem pretentious and shine little light on the themes being explored.

If the film is amateurish, Campos' sense of genuine curiosity, as well as the worthy themes being explored, nevertheless demand that this film be taken seriously. Forget the fact that the film has only one visually interesting sequence – a brilliant opening in which Robert sits in darkness, his head framed by the glow of a computer screen as he watches pornography – and focus instead on the ideas being addressed.

Robert, who is addicted to the internet and obsessed with images, is concerned about whether or not he is a "good person". He confesses to a guidance counsellor that he is desensitised to both pornography and violence and reveals that he is fascinated only by the "real". Indeed, when watching a certain piece of pornography, Robert is interested only in that fleeting moment in which the actress is strangled, terrified and so drops her "fake" "porn star persona". What Robert has realised is that everything is an image, everyone wears a mask, and that only at the moment of violence does something authentic tend to slip into view. As such, with childlike curiosity, Robert strangles his girlfriend and forces one of the dying girls to gag on blood. He wants to peek beneath the mask. This is not to say that "violence" is more "real" than other human behaviour, but rather, that all desire has a violent element. As everyone from Freud to Lacan shows, desire and the death-drive are intertwined; in an attempt to satiate desire, the self seeks to transcend the flesh and move toward pain and then outright annihilation (of the Self or Other).

What the film thus does is link this "search for the Real" with, not only the fact that everything and everyone is now an unreal image, our 21stC world a participatory data-bank of pixel-like fragments to be consumed, digitised and digested, but the realisation that the equivalency of all things under the gaze of New Media leads only to the derrealization of a world which can now only be transcended (ie felt) through Kubrickean ultra-violence.

Many have dismissed Robert as a psycho. But like Alex in Kubrick's " Clockwork Orange", the point is that Robert is the only one questioning the world around him. Robert rapes, has sex, indulges in violence and engages in all manners of "dark" things by proxy (using the internet and film), and yet during the death of the "twin" girls (another Kubrickean allusion) he is the only person who steps out of the camera and into the real, where he touches their dying bodies.

"Why didn't you do something?" adults ask Robert in relation to the dying girls. "Are you serious?" adults ask Robert in relation to his probing video about their death. But though everyone dismisses Robert, he is precisely the only person who "does something" and is "serious". When he makes a movie which seeks to investigate the lives of the "twins", reconciling their outward angelic beauty and their need for drugs, their "unified image" and their "fragmented reality", he is thinking about, considering, and questioning his own ethical stance in relation to things.

Significantly, the film ends with Robert in a library. He seems to have escaped the internet, trading the allure of images for his writings and books. He seems to be a "changed subject", able to integrate video images with a tactile life which touches rather than freezes all in the moment of the (machinic) vision. But this moment of uplift is undercut by the film's final image, in which Robert is spied on by an invisible mobile phone camera. Sadly, Robert the artist now epitomises the trauma of 21stC reality, living life like an image, an isolated shard within the mediated universe. What the film says is not only that the young are ill equipped to navigate the ethics of today, but that being equipped to today is itself unethical.

Beyond this the film touches upon other themes - disaffection, alienation, the spread of pornography and mediated violence, the way everyone is now "medicated" in one way or the other, the fact that adults are unaware of the radical (and dark) social changes which teens and kids are facing, hypocrisy, a viewing-obsessed youth culture etc – though only faintly.

7.9/10 – Interesting.

Afterschool - grueling watch

[brownjackie · 7/10 · 22 October 2012]

As noted by many, Afterschool is one in a bunch of teen death films, but that doesn't necessarily make it unoriginal or plot less. Afterschool does have a developing plot, but its visual side IS unoriginal. Many mention Van Sant's Elephant (2003), - personally I thought of Michael Haneke many times, especially his Benny's Video (1992), which is thematically similar and also must have been a visual inspiration for Afterschool. I do think that director Campos has succeeded in getting formidable performances out of his actors, especially Ezra Miller, who portrays adolescent depression and bewilderment forcefully, and Michael Stuhlbarg as the principal. With Afterschool, he has made one of the most depressing films American cinema has ever produced (that I've seen). EVERYTHING is wrong in the world portrayed in this film, and especially adults are univocally idiotic and destructive, they are hypocrites, mean, egotistic, inhumane, and/or stupid. It's almost as frustrating to watch as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), (grueling death realism for 150 minutes in Romania), but not as brilliant. I generously give 7 stars to Afterschool, because I am a huge Ezra Miller-fan, but be advised:

This movie is very nearly impossible to love.

AFTERSCHOOL deserves a "detention"

[charlytully · 6/10 · 19 December 2011]

AFTERSCHOOL is a raw movie, and not in a good way. Unlike ELEPHANT or THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES or even ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, this offering from Connecticut does a very poor job of building tension toward a cathartic climax. Instead, it allows a promising premise of an underclassman's video class assignment inadvertently capturing a moment of drama on campus to dissipate, petering out through a collage of implausible plot points, poor characterizations, and limp dialog. AFTERSCHOOL is raw as in raw eggs, and who likes those, except ROCKY and other such masochists? Perhaps this movie could be taken as a "morning after" pill; an antidote to the over-sexed, all-powerful Van Wilders and Stiflers of the Wild Bunch school of campus film-making. But with the two main characters a high school sophomore and freshman at a boarding school, what drugs and sexual misbehavior happens here (such as a nonchalant stroll to nearby a campus dale overlooked by upper floor school windows for a muddy consensual double-deflowering in broad daylight) seem beyond the pale for even these pampered yidiots. (Of course, there WAS that related item of Alaskan high school news a while back . . . )

Interesting, but slow.

[marcioharker · 7/10 · 20 September 2016]

It's an interesting movie, with great acting, especially Ezra Miller, but at same time is really slow, with steering and editing problems and a confusing ending. After all he leaves the feeling it could be something really amazing, but... it's not. Unfortunately, because there was a lot of potential here, with teens and their problems with drugs,masturbation, sex and etc. And how adults can react to it. In the end it's a movie that the people really should see, but you have to be patient and have some free time, too. Ezra Miller is probably the best thing here, his acting fits perfectly well the misunderstood and lonely Robert, probably suffering from depression and other ills and dilemmas so typical to all of us in adolescence.

A piece of undelivered promise

[Hail-the-Eraser · 3/10 · 4 June 2010]

Though it undoubtedly bears promise, this is a film which will test your patience like few others. The film is slow-paced, which one could argue is a way for Campos to build further isolation from the main character, yet fails to depict anything interesting in its entire running time.

The characters are all cardboard-thin, save for the protagonist whose loneliness and eccentricity is apparent yet inaccessible. Believe me, I tried to feel some sort of emotional connection with him, but never achieved much except a strong yearning to fast forward the film through conversations that initially felt pointless and ultimately proved to be so. If Campos can take his skills of plot-structuring and possibly add more dialog to further reveal other aspects of his characters, then I strongly believe he has the potential to make an excellent film, but I just found this one to be an inaccessible drag.

Coming of age in the YouTube generation

[Chris Knipp · 8/10 · 22 September 2008]

The 24-year-old Campos has been winning prizes for his short films for the past eight years; started film-making at thirteen and completed his first short film at seventeen; has been a Presidential Scholar; and wrote the script for this film at the Cannes Residence in Paris in fall 2006. It premiered at the 2008 Cannes Un Certain Regard series. Campos, who was a scholarship student at an exclusive international school himself and then went to study film at NYU, has been rejected from many festivals, but Cannes has led him to the NYFF. He has a group of friends and associates from NYU, and has founded Borderline Films. (See the interview "Filmstock: Antonio Campos 'After School'" on PlumTV.)

'Afterschool,' which speaks of a boy and girl in a fancy East Coas prep school video club, of the boy's roommate, and the death of twin Alpha Girl classmates, is a film of and about the YouTube generation. It begins with Rob (Ezra Miller) watching an online porn site called "Nasty Cum Holes" (or something like that) in which a man, unseen, is talking dirty to a young prostitute. Rob is in his dorm room, which he shares with Dave (Jeremy Allen White), who deals drugs. The video club links him with Amy (Addison Timlin), with whom he loses his virginity. While ostensibly making a sort of promotional video for the school he is shooting a hallway and stairway and all of a sudden two twin girls, the most admired in the school as it happens, appear overdosing. Robert rushes down the hall to them and the camera continues to watch as he sits on the floor with them as they die. Links between all this and Michael Haneke's 'Caché' and Van Sant's 'Elephant' are almost too obvious to mention.

In what follows there is a lot that shows the hypocrisy and confusion of the teachers, the headmaster, and the kids. Rob is so full of emotion throughout the entire film that he finds himself almost completely shut down. Mr. Wiseman the therapist or counselor (Lee Wilkof) succeeds in getting him to open up a tiny bit by trading obscene insults with him. (Campos' admiration for Frederick Wiseman's 'High School' led him to pay homage with the character's name.) A lot of 'Afterschool' is seen either as a video camera (or even a cell phone camera) see it, or as Rob sees it. When his lit teacher is talking about 'Hamlet,' he is watching her crotch, legs, and cleavage and that's what the camera sees. At other times the camera is fixed and one speaker is cut out of the picture, or you see only the edge of his head. Campos is not of the shaky, hand-held school of realism. His evocation of the sensibility of his young characters goes deeper than that. When kids today see something like a girlfight (or a boyfight) at school, somebody films it, and when it's filmed it's going to wind up on the Internet. There's a girlfight Rob and his roommate watch on the Web and then they're in a boyfight with each other in which Rob lets out his sudden pent up anger. Maybe his roommate is guilty in the twin girls' death. But as the school headmaster somewhat facilely says, maybe they all are. A wave of repression follows the incident--perhaps evoking the aftermath of 9/11, which Campos interchanged with the girls' death to get kids' reaction shots.

Campos likes moments that make us and himself uncomfortable, starting with the opening porn video, but continuing with Rob's experience and the world seen through his eyes. (Campos made a short film in which a young girl sells her virginity on eBay and loses it for real on camera to an older man.) Rob's safety is continually compromised and his emotions are uncertain. He doesn't know who he is, and neither does the filmmaker. Rob is a cleancut, even beautiful, boy, but he is almost clinically shut down--not an unusual state for a male teenager, maybe even more likely in a privileged setting like a New England prep school.

Rob and Amy are assigned the task of making a 'memorial film' about the dead twins. However the film he makes is too abstract, existential, ironic and just plain crude to be acceptable. When his supervisor sees it he thinks it's meant to be a mean joke. Later a more sweetened up and conventional version of the film is shown to the whole school, which we also see. Altering and re-editing reality is a continual theme of 'Afterschool.' As Deborah Young of 'Hollywood Reporter' writes, 'Afterschool' "is a sophisticated stylistic exercise too rarefied for wide audiences, but earmarked for critical kudos." It may seem in the watching more crude than it is. The cobbled-together vernacular images are clumsy, but the filmmaker is supple, deft, and sophisticated technically and bold intellectually--still-beyond his years. He has also captured a world he himself knows personally with rather stunning accuracy.

(Note: I am not sure of all the characters' names and may have got some identifications wrong here.)

Afterschool(2008) 2/5

[teg5037 · 4/10 · 29 March 2011]

Critics who have been comparing Campos to Kubrick and Van Sant must owe him a favor.This film was not the worst movie I have ever seen,it just could of been so much better. I did not mind the slow pace. I did not mind any of the acting,it just didn't deliver with the story. I thought this movie was building up to some climax that I wouldn't see coming: *SPOILER* it doesn't. *SPOILER* Sure, it showed him possibly choking out one of the twins, but I had more expectations that. *SPOILER* Why didn't he rat out his douche bag roommate for possibly supplying the drugs, or why didn't he rat out the school after the counselor told him that the school knew the twins were drug fiends and had problems. Also, *SPOILER* the memorial video he made was stupid. It really was. I thought it would of been better if he exposed the twins as druggies and somehow managed to pile in information to show that the school knew and didn't do anything about it. Instead, it was a horrible clip of people staring, almost like he was stalking them . Like I said before, I didn't mind the slow pace, but Jesus, it's gotta build to something. Some positives about this film were how they showed the curiosity of teenagers and sex, how Campos took a modern direction with twisted teens in today's society and technology, and how awkward it can be to live with a roommate you hate.Ill finish off with saying this: If you find yourself halfway through this movie and you are not enjoying it, do yourself a favor and turn it off...you won't miss anything.

Innovative and thought-provoking

[destiny_gr14 · 9/10 · 19 September 2008]

Afterschool is a movie about a boarding school in United States and how rotten is the environment there. The film's pace is slow but that helps the viewer appreciate the photography and the filming technique. The comments of the director about the hypocrisy of the school teachers and the faulty communication between students and their parents are discreet but effective in a filming manner. The acting is superb (most of the cast has worked at New York theaters) and there are some innovations in the cinematography (different angles and film-editing games). It certainly reminds us of "Elephant" (Gus Van Sant) because of the subject but here the interest is centered in drug abuse and how someone witnesses it even though he/she is not connected to the drug-user. In addition, it comments on many more perspectives of puberty. An interesting film that leaves many thoughts to the viewer without forcing him/her to create a specific opinion. A definite must-see!

Well made but really dull and far from the font of wisdom it thinks it is

[dbborroughs · 3/10 · 4 October 2009]

I'm trying to figure out why this was shown at last years New York Film Festival. At the same time I'm so incredibly happy that I didn't see it there and over paid for the privilege to watch paint dry. The plot of the film has an internet addicted teen at a prep school who is so disconnected with the world that the only thing real is what he sees in the You Tube clips or through his video recorder accidentally record the drug overdose of two of the girls in the school. We then watch as events play out. Long dull shots framed off kilter so as to cut off peoples heads combine together to reveal a story about teen life that is so artificial that you'd have to have limited exposure to either children or the films about them to truly be shocked at revelations. Alienation? Who would have thought? Drug Use? Amazing.Adults that are condescending and don't listen? Who knew? I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. When the overdose occurs, I'm not sure how long into the film, a good distance, I was bored so my sense of time was all screwed up, I figured that the film would pick up. It really didn't. Honestly they sort of lost me with the opening montage of viral clips. One instantly got a sense of where it was going and what the filmmakers were going to be saying and the film didn't disappoint. I thought for awhile that the off kilter camera was always from the hero's point of view and then I realized that not, his head was chopped off sometimes too. Sometimes you wonder why a film can play something as prestigious as the New York Film Festival and not get a distribution deal or one that delays the release for a year or more, thats not the case here, its clear why no one picked it up, its dull and far from revealing. As I said at the outset the real question is how this dull little film ended up in any film festival at all.

An eerie and disturbing look at child psychology and underage drug use

[blakelockett45 · 8/10 · 25 June 2016]

Antonio Campos delivers a slow and hypnotically paced film that keeps it's audience on edge with just a few disturbing scenes that leave the viewer to speculate rather than to spell it all out. The film deals with Robert, a school kid who's camera pics up the death of two school girls, and the events around the deaths. Robert seems to be just a shy kid at first, a regular teen. But there's soon revealed to be a darker side to him and a rather disassociated psych. In this generation of dissociation through images, these are themes myself and my own generation are dealing with today. There is hope in the chaos that the film puts forth and some good natured characters all dealing with guilt surrounding the death of the two girls. But there is an eye opening eeriness to the detachment and the falseness of some people in these situations. 8 out of ten stars

Not really a good movie

[garyd9 · 20 August 2011]

I'll try to make this short and sweet. The movie is slow and boring, but worst of all - it's irritating. The director tries to get cute with the camera and it just doesn't work - you spend most of the movie just trying to figure out who is saying what. (I've seen movies with innovative camera work - this is not one of them.) The plot is murky...there's no resolution to the story. SPOILER: you think the main character maybe killed one of the girls by suffocating her with a hand over her mouth, but you can't really be sure. SPOILER: if you pay attention to the dialog, you could even think his roommate may have killed them both inadvertently by trying to "drug" them for ulterior motives (early in the film, the main character suggests to his roommate - the drug dealer - that he could drug them; further support for this theory is: since his roommate was selling drugs all over the school...how come the 2 girls are the only ones who died? Why would the doses the girls bought contain rat poisoning, but other doses he sold did not?) - but again, you just can't really tell if that is what happened. 'Sorry - but I really dislike a movie where you basically know less about what happened in it AFTER you've watched it.

I also have to agree with the reviewers here who said the memorial video created by the main character was NOT insightful and honest, but just inappropriate and plain stupid (now that I think about it - it was a lot like the movie it's a part of).

Finally, I just want to point out an error in another review here, where the reviewer refers to a scene with students lining up and taking pills by saying "...all the students are now given daily doses of pills..." suggesting that the students were all given drugs daily as a reaction to the drug overdose deaths.

In the first place, had the reviewer paid a bit more attention: there is an almost identical scene earlier in the movie - well BEFORE the girls die.

Secondly, it's a common practice in most boarding schools that students are not allowed to keep and take their own prescription drugs...they have to go to the school clinic at the proper times to receive them.

This prevents abuse and/or selling of prescription drugs, while helping to lower school liability in case a student is not taking their prescribed drugs when they're supposed to. That's what that scene (and the earlier similar scene) was about - NOT a repressive school system forcing students to take drugs for their own good!

I guess I can't blame that reviewer for missing that - this movie is very easy to misunderstand. Very little of it is very clear.

Couldn't finish it (honest, I tried)

[jimcheva · 3/10 · 24 January 2009]

OK. I've tried to finish this exercise in audience alienation twice. First I stopped after half an hour of watching admittedly realistic, if over-familiar and desultory, dialog, and trying to stay interested in people I only half-saw, or saw from a distance, or from the back of their heads, all going through what looked very much like what innumerable prep school students go through regularly. Having decided there really wasn't a point to this, I came here and discovered... there is a Major Dramatic Event in the movie! Somewhere. So I put in the DVD again and watched for about ten minutes past said Major Dramatic Event. Only to find more perfectly believable, probably emotionally rich, scenes shown at a numbing distance and presented at a tortuously slow pace. Yes, this film is like "Elephant" - and a number of other punishingly self-indulgent Gus Van Sant films. Not to mention various low-budget French films I saw in Paris in the Eighties (I mainly remember long shots of people walking down hallways, the echo of their footsteps the only soundtrack). This is, in other words, a parody of many people's worst fantasy of an independent film. It's not exaggerated to say I got to the point where I was actually resenting the film's abuse of my (not overly available) time. As for being "innovative".... if you loved "Last Year at Mariendbad" (1961), this kind of film-making will be right up your alley.

A Masterpiece of Restraint

[bavery-4 · 10/10 · 31 October 2009]

I can certainly see why some people wouldn't like this movie; the pacing is slow to the point that people raised on "Cloverfield" (which I happened to enjoy) and the like will probably be slitting their wrists. But, having attended a school like the one in the movie, I can tell you that the level of realism is startlingly accurate; each character could easily be someone who I knew in high school.

If you enjoy restrained directing and acting, this is an absolute must see. It is one of the few movies that almost makes you forget there is a camera involved; it is like your own private lens into the world. I rarely give a movie a perfect score, but this one earned it.

Freshman student film that failed. Miserably.

[emdoub · 2/10 · 25 June 2011]

I don't mean the remarkably inept product of the protagonist, seen in this film, I mean this film.

Truly wretched camera work and editing, a total failure in character development, and a lack of plot that must have been intentional are only the beginning. There was some decent acting (though the special-features interview with the lead actor achieved more audience attachment in 3 minutes than the entire film did), but the direction was amazingly inept. Truly, Ewe Boll films are better.

You'll see totally pointless scenes tossed in at random (some guy throwing a ball against a wall, irrelevant to anything else in the movie, is only one such), a total failure on the part of the school faculty that I thought was intended to parody itself, but was apparently meant to be taken seriously, and total opacity from all of the characters - you see them doing things, but why they're doing them, or why they do anything, remains a mystery. The camera work was obviously intended to show alienation, but all it achieved was to alienate the audience. Much of the action happens just out-of-frame; a kiss happens with nothing but the girl's hair visible, and that's some of the better cinematography.

The director/writer/editor was, apparently, trying to be creatively arty. What he achieved was, sadly, amateurish failure. He was trying to portray teenage angst, but he only made that tedious. He was trying to cause revulsion in his audience at the inhumanity of attending a boarding school; he revolted me with his lack of ability to say anything to an audience.

You've been warned - you won't get those hours back. You won't even be able to trade them in for a blank - you'll carry the horror of this ineptitude with you.

Given a choice between watching this again, watching any 3 Ewe Boll movies, and being shot at sunrise, I'd have to think it over - but I think I'd take Ewe Boll over being shot. Watching this again would take a poor third in that contest.

A Boy and His Camera

[RedQueenIMDB · 2/10 · 26 August 2013]

Afterschool is an ingenious voyeur's study on voyeurism. Kids today devour video toxic waste unguided and with no way to digest the daily dose of random clips that are void of any meaning or purpose, but are still irresistibly taboo.

With its overstimulated emotional shut down and pathetic sentiment throughout, the film is confusing and has no cohesive story, all by design. The amateur documentary effects suck. And are also intentional.

Afterschool does make a statement. With multi-dimensional accuracy.

But as much as I admire its genius, I didn't like watching this movie. I would only recommend it to parenting intellectuals.

Well crafted film

[tj0331 · 9/10 · 15 April 2013]

I was excited to see this film after discovering the director in a group interview he did with other filmmakers. I think reading his interviews before seeing the film helped set the tone for me as well. Overall I think it is a brilliant movie. It screamed Kubrick tones to me throughout, which I enjoyed. It was not overbearing in that aspect, just tasteful shots that were long and clever that hearken all my favorite Kubrick moments. Now for the story, I think once you see the end it feels like a great story. I felt on edge wondering if the main character was developing how I thought he was. Little aspects slip here and there that made me think there would be no pay off, but it felt solid all together. I think this filmmaker should have an interesting career ahead of him. I am excited to see his next feature after reading the premise.

Interesting Concept, Horrible Execution

[mikeatlarge · 1/10 · 8 January 2011]

Having liked Ezra Miller in City Island, and having liked seemingly similar festival films, I figured I'd enjoy Afterschool. Nope. Not even a little.

As other reviewers have said, Campos really blew it with this one. I'm not sure if he was trying to be really different than all the other dark teen angst films, if he honestly believes there's a big enough audience for a film like Afterschool, or if he just didn't care if it was a viable movie.

What makes this movie so painfully bad isn't the story, subject matter, or acting. It's the bizarre cinematography, and to a lesser degree, the mostly scattered, slow and dull script.

Voyeuristic high-school realism at its best.

[jacob-j-mouradian · 8/10 · 15 January 2012]

I remember first seeing the trailer for this a long while back and wanting to see this, but I just never got around to doing so. Now I don't know why I waited so long. I think this is a great film that takes a serious and realistic look at high school life. The characters mumble and show little emotion in an effort to blend in to their surroundings and not stick out, yet they all hide their own dark secrets and personality flaws from the rest of the world. They adapt voyeuristic tastes and view the troubles of others instead of deal with their own, whether through watching cell phone videos of student fights on YouTube or making such spying videos of their own. The acting does get a bit dull at times and tedious to follow along with, and the quiet audio and super-steady camera shots may start to drag on one's patience. But for the most part that fits along with the amateurish, voyeuristic mood of the piece. And the performances, for how plain they were, do captivate the audience in a neo-realistic sense. This is a director to keep an eye on in the future.

Unnecessarily disturbing imagery

[alexisjjames-813-116322 · 1/10 · 22 May 2015]

Just a warning to those who are disturbed by seeing clips of actual murder, actual abuse against women and a bunch of other violent and graphic imagery. All of this appears in the first few minutes of the movie when the Ezra Miller character is surfing videos on the internet mostly graphic violence including real clips of murder and then lands on some porn showing a young woman being intentionally and extensively humiliated and then choked in what is obviously a more than she bargained for aspect of the clip which ends with the actual sex act. There is other fictionalized stuff that is disturbing later on but the first few minutes alone would make this movie unwatchable to most people. This unfortunately was on my cable company's on-demand menu without any warnings as to its extremely disturbing content.

This film scares me ????

[newmans · 3/10 · 10 December 2011]

This film scares me. Not that there is anything scary in the film, it is far too boring and slow to be scary. It's pace leaves you wondering who is retarded.

It is about two bored uninspired, possibly demented high-school underclass students making a documentary. The film is shot as if it is also their documentary, and it's overall quality reflects this. Maybe this is the films only achievement to me. Not the quality of the filming but the overall quality.

Now what scares me? That some people found a level of inspiration or quality to rate it so highly, my three is a sympathy vote.

My recommendation?, unless you are really into slow, boring, weird stuff, look further.

Deliberate Brilliance

[brownfrichard · 10/10 · 21 January 2012]

Ezra Miller is great actor in addition to have grown up to be pretty hot. Anyway, in Afterschool, Miller is a nobody kid at a prep school who accidentally videotapes two popular girls die overdosing on tainted cocaine. As the school goes into damage control trying to shake out all the drugs, Miller starts to act erratically believing he is under surveillance. Surveillance, public image and acts of watching are huge themes in movie. Apparently a lot of people don't care for the slow pace of the story and static camera scenes. I could write a book on why every shot matters. Not for everybody's taste but film students and cinephiles will love it. I think it's brilliant.