What makes this high school movie special is that it's all artfully shot in an apparently artless manner, says Philip French

There's a high school movie virtually every week nowadays. This week one is a distinctive first feature by a 26-year-old writer-director.

  1. Afterschool
  2. Production year: 2008
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 18
  5. Runtime: 122 mins
  6. Directors: Antonio Campos, Kenji Uchida
  7. Cast: Addison Timlin, Christopher McCann, Dariusz M Uczkowski, Ezra Miller, Jeremy Allen White, Masato Sakai, Rosemarie DeWitt, Yo Oizumi
  8. More on this film

Antonio Campos's impressive antinomian campus drama takes place in a snobbish mixed prep school in New England where the rich pupils think themselves above normal social laws. The resident outsider, withdrawn wimpish sophomore Robert (Ezra Miller), immerses himself in violent and erotic material on YouTube. To approach a desirable girl, he signs on for a video class and, in the course of shooting material for a class project, he accidentally films beautiful blond twins dying after taking cocaine cut with rat poison. Robert's weirdly affectless response to their deaths makes him the centre of attention, gets him assigned to make a documentary memorialising the twins, leads to his first fumbling sexual experience and culminates in a sort of breakdown.

It's an intriguing scenario, but what makes the film special (if at times slightly trying) is that it's all artfully shot in an apparently artless manner, everything badly framed, with significant events off-camera, heads chopped at the neck and much poor focusing, as if the movie was put together from footage recorded by inexperienced film-makers or on CCTV, cellphones and hidden cameras. Campos is a man to watch.

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