Afterschool is about the shape of things to come: starring 15-year-old Ezra Miller, directed by 23-year-old Antonio Campos, regarding the 10-year-old society we were born into. I was nine years old when the film came out, and viewing the film for the first time last year I recognized everything this film presented as simply the natural state of the world. That should terrify you; it terrified Campos enough to make a film about it, and it’s rendered terrifying in Afterschool. It’s a film so strange, so alien, recalling the chilly surrealism of Videodrome that I have to ultimately remind myself that nothing surreal is actually going on, that the film is, in fact, aggressively real, more real than realistic films typically allow for.

It’s a story of a boy named Rob, who goes to a boarding school in Connecticut and accidentally captures the deaths of two popular twin girls on his video camera. The film deals with the trauma in the aftermath of this disaster on both Rob and the school, both of which were on unstable ground beforehand, and go spiraling out of control afterward. It’s a plot that’s quite clearly applicable to 9/11, almost by default. The young school is threatened by the violent fall of two tall, blonde, coke-snorting twins (named the Talbots); terrorized by violent, captivating internet videos; and regulated by a brash, jokey, well-meaning authority figure’s intensely strict surveillance state that doesn’t stop very many crimes at all. The allegory is so perfect it’s dull, easily the dullest lens through which to view the film, but it’s useful as another way to look at Campos’ true thematic concern. We now know that we’re constantly being watched, by our government and our society, but in the internet age, this hasn’t changed us at all. It’s only codified into law what has already been de facto true about our internet age: we’re constantly under surveillance, and nothing is real until it’s caught on video.

This film’s opening is nothing short of the Kuleshov effect put to its most important use yet in 21st century filmmaking. In a small frame, much smaller than the widescreen frames that follow, we cut between several online videos: a laughing baby opening a present, a violent fight between two girls, a kid trying to rail grind his bike and wiping out on the pavement, the hanging of Saddam Hussein, a cat playing piano, violent footage from American troops in the middle east, and hardcore porn courtesy of nastycumholes.com. This montage depicts an experience that everyone using the internet regularly has had, the intense juxtaposition of horrifying violence and adorable humour, like when you’ve just finished reading an article about immigrant children in cages, and then return to your YouTube cat video. Social networks make it impossible not to witness, perhaps, horrible violence just beneath photos of a nice dinner. There’s a subreddit called “fifty fifty” in which every link leads to either something awful or something sweet, for example this gif, which may depict either dogs slurping noodles or a suicide in a seven-eleven. That this corner of the internet exists is proof of Campos’ prophecy.

These videos are all “real” with the exception of the porn: there is nobody named Cherry Dee and there is no nastycumholes.com. This video is our carefully selected transition into the diegesis: it’s being watched by Rob (Ezra Miller), our profoundly lonely protagonist, so alienated by his environment that he’s on the verge of dissociating completely. Our first non-diegetic shot of the film is Rob watching porn, framed in such a way where the only onscreen light comes from his computer screen, Rob’s silhouette blending in with the black background; he’s defined only by his relationship to technology (figuratively and literally). We frequently see the back of Rob’s head, in front of a blurry screen that we can barely make out, given only the visual tableau of a boy on the internet, never really getting to know either the boy or the internet separately. In one early shot, about five minutes into the film, we see Rob toying around with the hand sensing sink, waving his finger around to start it and stop it. This small moment defines Rob’s character: he is tortured by his relationship to technology, always inquiring about how it works, how it serves him, and if it’s real. Nobody else would stop to interact so much with a hand-sensing sink; they’d accept it or they’d be slightly annoyed with it when it doesn’t work. Rob’s approach to the internet is the same: he wants to wave his finger around his technology and interact with it, stick his face into it and see what’s real about it.  

Campos’ themes are in perfect lockstep with his cinematic scheme. To put it bluntly, this film is both formally precise and deeply ugly. Nearly every shot is drained of colour and full of empty space, and the edits are in no rush to hurry the images along. Almost never, in the diegetic world, do you get a good look at anyone’s face: it’s either turned to the side, just cut off by the frame, just out of focus, or it’s rendered small and insignificant by a shot that’s too wide for comfort. When we do get faces, it’s mostly on the video-within-a-video, whether it’s Cherry Dee or Rob’s girlfriend or Rob himself on the webcam. Campos denies us the immediate virality and the instant gratification of the internet by making his film the opposite. He represents all his online video by a small box in the middle of the frame. This framing works as a sort of acknowledgement of a “real” camera, where authenticity is allowed to exist. As a matter of perverse irony (or perhaps not), the film is only available in standard definition on Amazon, and so there is a large black box around the frame at all times. It’s just a matter of when the box is smaller or bigger.

In a film where every shot is so microcosmic of story and theme, I find myself simply wanting to talk about the many shots that I love. There is one where Rob simply walks from left to right, talking to his mother on the phone, where the background is so out of focus that the faces of students turn into bokeh dots, and the frame becomes a warm, abstract image of near-impressionism. Later, while Rob films the headmaster’s contribution to the tribute video, the video camera and its small viewfinder screen are in focus while the headmaster himself is out of focus; he’s only real because he’s been filmed.

Is it more real because it was filmed?  Two of the film’s late scenes ask this question in opposite ways, before and after the tribute video. First, we see Rob fight with his roommate, violently punching him (like the video clip he shows his roommate at the beginning of a film), and from this we cut to a cell phone video of the event. Does that make it real? Next, we see the death of the Talbots (immediately after their memorial video), previously captured from faraway cell phones and security cameras, in a handheld, crystal-clear close-up from Rob’s perspective (incidentally two of the only clear faces we get in the film, bloodied and pathetic and barely alive). Again, is it now more real because it was filmed?

For most of the film, it appears as if a Taxi Driver style violent explosion is building inside Rob, but it never comes (if that fight with his roommate is it, then it’s a pretty weak one, one that denies catharsis). The actual ending is enigmatic and haunting, putting the fourth wall break to its most disturbing use since Gloria Swanson’s final close-up in Sunset Boulevard. Rob looks directly into Campos’ cinematic camera, cut to a cell phone camera, cut to black. The final barrier between the cinematic camera and the cell phone camera, the diegetic camera and the non-diegetic one, has been broken. In that moment, this film reveals its true aim as such a confounding, disturbing, dissociating film: it’s Blow Up for the internet age, a film about a camera revealing the truth that never reveals the truth to us.

Afterschool, already a film latent with disturbing, violent, alienating content, makes no attempt to soften the blow: it’s glacially paced and impenetrable, a cocktail of boredom and dread that I found, on a first viewing, nigh impossible to sit through, but also impossible not to finish, and impossible to stop thinking about. It’s like a found object, an obscure video from “the weird part of YouTube” that you just have to see to believe.