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Derek Malcolm's rating
Heady drama in Afterschool
By
Derek Malcolm
21 Aug 2009
There was a four-hour cut of Antonio Campos’s first feature and it’s a bit too long even at its present length.
But this is still a heady American school drama, in which computer-geek student Robert (Ezra Miller) accidentally films two of the most desirable sisters in the elite East Coast establishment dying of a mixture of cocaine and rat poison.
He’s ordered to make a movie as a tribute to them but it’s a bit too left-field to help the campus-wide healing process and gets re-edited by the headmaster.
Meanwhile, the sheltered atmosphere of the school is fatally compromised.
The film’s lengthy takes and use of grainy digital and video technology are sometimes a bane, but Campos is definitely trying for something different as he milks both the atmosphere and the boy’s adolescent angst to good effect.
You could say that both Gus Van Sant and the documentarist Frederick Wiseman were his American influences, and Michael Haneke among his European ones.
This is certainly an original work, but not entirely successful in saying anything new about the way we watch “reality” today at second hand.
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