Bo Burnham’s narrative feature debut finds humor and hope in a painfully realistic middle school story.
Take the tangle of complex adolescent emotions first revealed to the masses by John Hughes, mix them with Lady Bird McPherson’s preoccupation with self-definition, add in all the social dread of Carrie, and you’re about halfway to Eighth Grade, a beautiful, urgently modern take on coming-of-age from first-time narrative feature filmmaker Bo Burnham.
Despite these comparisons, Eighth Grade is a singular work of art: a story with depth and humor that manages to drop viewers squarely into the lives of present-day teens without ever feeling preachy or inauthentic. In a genre that often tempts filmmakers to step back, relying on retrospect to emphasize the relative smallness of the teen experience, Burnham instead captures middle school life with the visceral immediacy it deserves.
Fifteen-year-old Elsie Fisher (her character’s age at the time of filming) stars as Kayla, a sweet but nervous girl on the cusp of high school who is trying to gain confidence while inundated with modern technology and surrounded by classmates desperate to perform their grown-up-ness. Burnham could have easily made the internet a mustache-twirling villain—and doing so would have alienated the young audience this film will almost surely attract when it hits theaters later this year—but instead, he goes for something trickier, more subtle. In Eighth Grade, apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube are multi-purpose tools of creation and destruction, functioning as Kayla’s primary form of escape, connection, education, performance, and inevitably, self-doubt and disappointment. The result is a nerve-wracking but honest portrayal of young people’s’ relationship with the internet.
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