Afterschool

Plot synopsis:
While doing a film project at a private school, internet-video obsessed teenager Robert (Ezra Miller) catches two twins dying due to drugs contaminated with rat poison. Confused, Robert does not call for help but rather simply walks over to the girls and sits on the floor with them, pulling one into his lap as she dies. This scene, caught on security camera and by another student on a cell phone, is repeatedly shown, but always from the same angle: with Robert's back to the viewer. The viewer cannot see her death but only hear her cries slowly subside. This is all caught on a video camera Robert was using for a school project. The girls die. An atmosphere of paranoia and unease sets in among students and teachers, Robert being affected as well. The school claims that the drugs were bought outside the school and enforces a new, much harsher, drug policy wherein bags are searched and students are expelled. Robert and another student, Amy (Addison Timlin), are assigned to make a memorial video. The school is not happy with the result and has it re-edited, to make a smoother version.
While making the video, Robert and Amy begin a romantic relationship, wherein they both have sex for the first time in a wooded area. However, it is later hinted that their roommate may be involved romantically, as well. He fights with his roommate, who sold the drugs to the twins, and shouts that he killed the girls. The school questions him about this accusation, and is relieved that Robert says it was not substantiated. Robert is asked to take a leave of absence from the school. Toward the end of the film, we are finally shown the scene of the girls' deaths from the front and see Robert pressing his hand over her mouth and nose, smothering her. Later, Robert is shown at the school nurse, taking a daily dose of pills, showing that Robert is now on medication. The film ends as an unseen person with a cell phone videos him while he looks at two pictures of the deceased twins.

Tags: bleak, violence, suspenseful, psychological, flashback

Review:
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.
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..
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.
(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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
Afterschool is a movie about a boarding school in United States and how rotten is the environment there.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is a great film that takes a serious and realistic look at high school life.
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.
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.
Having liked Ezra Miller in City Island, and having liked seemingly similar festival films, I figured I'd enjoy Afterschool.
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.
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.
It's pace leaves you wondering who is retarded.It is about two bored uninspired, possibly demented high-school underclass students making a documentary.
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.
Robert's isolation from the world is what really makes the movie interesting.
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.
"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.
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.
Director Campos has created characters we don't care about and puts them in situations so dull and even far fetched if you managed to keep your eyes opened till the very end you've accomplished a lot.
Depressing, boring, and manipulative the director here is trying to make you feel like you're watching something of merit in terms of art.
AFTERSCHOOL is certainly not the kind of movie which would appeal to most people, yet this film very aptly portrays "the unease of a troubled state of mind".
The slow shots where things were cut off were really annoying, and I didn't enjoy watching a boy masturbate for no apparent reason for the movie.
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.
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.
Good actors here and elsewhere but since the director is trying an almost documentary kind of film their performances get in the way.
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).
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".
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.
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.
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 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..
"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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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?
'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.
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.
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.
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.
AFTERSCHOOL is a raw movie, and not in a good way.
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.