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Painfully pointless. , 29 August 2009
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Afterschool
on DVD
(2009)
Starring: Emory Cohen, Rosemarie DeWitt, Harrison Lees
Director: Antonio Campos
Certificate: 
I'm about to write the worst review I have ever put on this site. Buckle yourselves in. I'm sorry if it is impartial but I have just wasted my hard earned money watching this so called 'intelligent' rubbish and would have preferred, and got a lot more from, spending a couple of hours scratching my own face off. This has instantly gone into the top five of my worst films ever list alongside Straw Dogs and Armageddon.
The trailer and newspaper reviews promised so much but it failed to deliver on all levels. The acting by almost the whole cast wasn't so much naturalistic as necrotic. I think at least three of the leads may have been dead before filming started and operated by machinery. Bad machinery. I think they were so dead behind the eyes to make the film seem edgy and a large proportion of the script must have been made up of unspecific grunts.
This film is a real wannabe. It wants to portray a new and hard world for teenagers with all it's technology and porn and drugs and, oh, how are the little mites supposed to survive? The crux of the story surrounds a set of female twins at the boarding school who die from a drug overdose/bad cocaine.And that's about it. For two hours. These twins hadn't, I don't believe, delivered a line before they died so why the audience should gasp is beyond me. The rest of the film focusses on the lad who found them, who has underage sex (how abhorrent and shocking!), a penchant for porn and a miserably blank expression for the rest of the film. Rarely has a lead been so insipid and irritating.
The direction is trying to be 'cutting edge' and make the whole film seem like an elongated internet clip. A large amount is filmed with a camcorder, making most of the film out of focus, poorly executed and edited, unwatchable at times and exceedingly irritating. The direction is clunky, the storyline goes nowhere, and as soon as you realise it aint goin to, it's at this point that the final bit of colour will drain from your weary face. Long stationary shots of people staring vaguely at each other across a room as if everyone is made of wax and long panning shots of uninteresting walls and scenery make up most of the rest of this film.
At one point, we, the audience and the lead character are told by an ineffectual school counsellor on a level with South Park, 'we are all in some way to blame for those poor girl's deaths..you, me, everyone.' Give me a break. Please!! Where is personal responsibility? We all know the risks and many of us know the terrible affect the drugs trade has in poorer countries so if we, or the girls in this film choose to shovel it up our noses then we should be prepared to take the consequences of our actions. And that's not taking the moral highground, that's common sense.
Towards the end, when there was a stationary shot of the back of one character's head for what must have easily been over a minute with no dialogue, music or tension, I was very close to yelling 'WHY???' at the top of my voice and running up to punch the screen.
In fairness, my two friends said 'It wasn't good but I could stand it'. Put that on the DVD cover. Coz I'm afraid I couldn't. Only watch this film if you are catatonic, as it's so slow, you may be able to keep up. Alternatively, if you are a masochist or in the torture business, then stick this in the DVD one night in order to experience/inflict the utmost senseless pain.
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