If Campos had stuck to his guns and made a film about disaffected youth and the modern video age, I probably wouldn't have minded it too much. When he started breaking out the 9/11 metaphors though, I'm afraid that's when he lost me. It's all just a bit too heavy-handed and unfocused.

And I think it's possible to overdo that thing where you use shallow depth of field and abstract framing to convey dissociation and alienation. It can sometimes be good to have a shot or two where you can actually see everyone involved in the scene clearly. You know, for variety.

I liked this better when it was Benny's Video

Slow but gnawing. The static camerawork will put some people off, but Afterschool has some interesting ideas bubbling under its still surface.

Alternately fascinating and frustrating, this willfully disturbing drama is about the moral uncertainty that envelops an elite prep school when a student (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN's Ezra Miller) accidentally records two popular girls overdosing on cocaine and keeps filming rather than going for help. There are many great (if underdeveloped) ideas here about a generation numbed by YouTube, and director Antonio Campos is obviously a big fan of Michael Haneke. It doesn't quite all hang together, but Campos is certainly one to watch.

Bullied prep school loner Robert (Ezra Miller) captures his classmates’ various escapades on video, but when he winds up filming two girls fatally overdosing on cocaine, his footage plays a role in the emotional fallout within the school community. As the students and faculty at the sheltered academy try to cope with the tragedy, many spiral into despair. Antonio Campos directs this film, which explores the ethics of voyeurism. (Netflix)

AFTERSCHOOL is the third film I’ve seen starring Ezra Miller.

It’s the third time I’ve seen him play a high school student.

It’s the second time I’ve seen him play a high school student at the center of a high school murder.

And all three times I’ve seen Ezra Miller on screen I’ve thought, “this kid is really f’n good.”

As for the movie itself, AFTERSCHOOL is interesting and ambitious. But it’s nowhere near as captivating as its star.

godspeedhotfire.tumblr.com/post/48207465403/afterschool

This is what happens with experimental films some people are going to love it, some are going to hate it. I wouldn't say I hate the film it was bursting with creativity and ambition. The performances were good and felt realistic. However, the way in which the film was shot the audience was always kept at bay and I always felt I was looking at a film from the outside, the filmmaker did not invite the audience to be absorbed and engaged in the world he created, I don't know if this was intentional or not but, that's how the film was shot!

A tough character study on misguided youth and technology. The direction and composition could be considered heavy handed and forced at times but I found it interesting and refreshing.

I preferred this film to Antonio Campos' latest, 'Simon Killer'.

Bullied prep school loner Robert (Ezra Miller) captures his classmates’ various escapades on video, but when he winds up filming two girls fatally overdosing on cocaine, his footage plays a role in the emotional fallout within the school community. As the students and faculty at the sheltered academy try to cope with the tragedy, many spiral into despair. Antonio Campos directs this film, which explores the ethics of voyeurism. (Netflix)

AFTERSCHOOL is the third film I’ve seen starring Ezra Miller.

It’s the third time I’ve seen him play a high school student.

It’s the second time I’ve seen him play a high school student at the center of a high school murder.

And all three times I’ve seen Ezra Miller on screen I’ve thought, “this kid is really f’n good.”

As for the movie itself, AFTERSCHOOL is interesting and ambitious. But it’s nowhere near as captivating as its star.

godspeedhotfire.tumblr.com/post/48207465403/afterschool

See that Kevin kid? We totes need to talk about him.

SubBenny’s Video sub-Elephant level quasi-political provocation, but something in Campos’ approach elevates this above meandering dreck. Maybe it’s his total commitment to an admittedly tired subject, exploring the roots of interpersonal detachment and their end results (the 9/11 reveal is totally cheesy but again, I bought into it). Intently focused on the Internet as one of the tools of this disconnection, the idea isn’t so much that it’s a cause, but that the dispassionate conduct people engage in on this medium is another symptom of a world that simply doesn’t have any vested interest in raising morally-culpable adults, with closed systems like the corrupt private school producing people who view each other as blank-slates on which to project their own desires, repeating the same destructive behaviors they’ve seen practiced elsewhere.

Campos definitely likes his odd choice of framing, but like Simon Killer, I think it only works about half the time.

This film is basically a more fleshed out version of Haneke's 'Benny's Video'. It's nothing we haven't seen before and it was ultimately underwhelming despite some solid performances

Campos strives for discourse in formally inventive ways in this drama about tragedy at a prep school. There's a lot of interesting ideas at play, chief among them institutional cover-up and satire. But there's a point at which a director needs to know that excruciatingly long takes and glacially moving cameras don't always equal meaning. Though this film is never uninteresting, that's a testament mostly to Ezra Miller's dynamic acting debut rather than Campos' filmmaking technique.