Afterschool

Afterschool is the next in a long line of movies dealing with the increasing digitalization of the public optic. Taking place in a private boarding school in New York, the film deftly navigates the divide between analog and digital, and the new spectator/spectacle relationship that has become so confused in recent times.
Afterschool opens with a series of viral videos, moving from the nonsensical to the bizarre to the violent, culminating with a low quality (though possibly high definition) amateur porn in which a girl with a hand around her neck informs her mother that she is going to be “fucked for money”. Just as the girl’s shame and fear become palpable, the camera reveals that this footage is being played in a computer screen, the only illumination in a dark dorm room, and giving us the unmistakable outline of a young, masturbating high school boy. Thus the duality that will structure most of the film begins: the disturbing combination of sex and violence, but also the confusion of what is real and what is not.
Written and directed by Antonio Campos, Afterschool tells the story of Robert, a young, alienated boy who only finds solace in the thousands of videos steaming to him over the Internet. He is picked on by his drug-dealing roommate and appears awkward with the opposite sex until he is forced to work with a female classmate for his audio-video club. It is only with camera in hand, literally, that he seems to begin to open up, taking turns with his partner in reality show-like interviews to question each other about their sexual histories. However, all this comes to an abrupt end when, while taking B-roll of a hallway, Robert finds two senior girls violently overdosing on cocaine and Robert is forced to deal with the hardship of seeing a horror in real life.
The confusion and tension of the analog vs. the digital is the films strongest leg. Using important image queues such as depth of field, image grain, pixelization and exposure, Afterschool oscillates between images that are overwhelmingly digital and others that are highly filmic, hitting every level of confusion in between. Seamlessly moving between the two, Campos manages to create a film that at once plunges the viewer into the depths of the protagonist’s inner world while at the same time isolating him from any intrusion. The confusion between the reality before one’s eyes and the spectacle mediated by the digital perfectly mirrors and augments the unavoidable awkwardness and anxiety felt by adolescence. Indeed, the over-complications of already difficult circumstances is foregrounded when Robert, stumbling through his first moments of a physical relationship with a girl, attempts to recreate the sex scenes he has seen on the Internet.
As an examination of teen angst and anxiety in the digital age, Afterschool is a superb film. It is in scenes such as the through-the-camera interviews or Roberts first sexual experience that film really accomplishes its goals. So it is unfortunate that Campos chooses to convolute the movie with melodramatic twists such as the double overdose and a weird sub/side plot dealing with corruption and incompetence in the school system. As Campos tries to structure the film around these events, the film begins to feel contrived and stretched, lacking the mass or the will to fill such a complex and unnecessary niche. Still, even with these contrivances, the Afterschool still manages to maintain a level of raw verisimilitude that can only be found through eyes and lens of an actual teenager.

3/5