Director: Antonio Campos
Internet videos have enabled us to see and experience so much more of the world than we had been able before, and Afterschool captures this phenomenon by focusing on one particular event caught on tape that deeply affects a prep school. This is a film that captures the Youtube generation unlike any film I've ever seen. We have a main character who continuously watches videos on the internet, from videos of animals making music to videos of school fights to hardcore porn. But when he accidentally captures a death on camera and experiences it in real life, he is unable to process the reality of the situation.
This is a film with a formalist style worthy of Stanley Kubrick and Michael Haneke. It's cold and clinically shot by a 24-year-old filmmaker who displays an amazing amount of control in his feature film debut. The camera itself serves as a voyeuristic eye similar to the videos at the center of the film. Frames are blocked in a very precise manner, but it seems like there is no sense of blocking because people are always oddly cutoff by the edge of the frame and it makes the movie seem like something captured and not staged. The camera does not move much, but when it does it avoids mobile framing, instead it does not anticipate the movements of the actors, again acting as a voyeuristic eye. All of those visual decisions actually lead up to the final shot, a shot that makes you question the most important person in the room, yourself.
Grade: A-
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