Currently available on DVD: "Afterschool"

You have a choice when sitting down to watch Afterschool, an arresting feature by Antonio Campos about death at a snooty prep school. You can put a figurative lens in front of your eyes with the words “The guy was only 24 when he made this” stenciled on it and have everything you see colored by that. Or you can just absorb the movie as you would any other, giving it a chance to catch your interest and creep you out.

The film first attracted attention at festivals, some of it from people who apparently had that lens in place. They have written at length about the stylistic quirks Campos loads into the movie, detailing who used them before and better (like Gus Van Sant, Michael Haneke and the documentarian Frederick Wiseman). The subtext is, “See, the kid’s not really that talented.”


But such dissecting of influences (all of which Campos has acknowledged anyway) doesn’t shed much light in this age of cultural overproduction, when almost nothing is truly original and everybody is imitating or sampling or homaging or ripping off someone else. So let’s instead consider the real question: Is Afterschool any good?

The film focuses on Robert (Ezra Miller), a withdrawn underclassman who consumes Web videos, though “focuses on” isn’t perhaps the best choice of words. Campos goes in heavily for unconventional shots, the characters being barely in the frame, the camera lingering on legs or empty hallways. He also likes the stationary long shot, like something a security camera might take. It all makes for a slow-evolving tale, especially since Campos has yet to learn when such gimmicks wear out their welcome and plain-old storytelling is required. But it sure does build ominousness.

Robert joins an after-school video-production club, and while shooting footage in a stairwell he accidentally captures the deaths of two fellow students, popular twin girls who have taken bad drugs. Paranoia settles over the institution, even as Robert is asked to make what his adviser assumes will be a celebratory video tribute to the dead students. Campos plays with viewpoint, time and everything else as he chronicles Robert’s increasing instability.

In truth there isn’t much story here, or much insight either; the kind of alienated teenagers wandering through this film exist in movies far out of proportion to their number in real life. But those with the patience to wait out Campos’s overindulgences will definitely finish watching Afterschool unnerved, which is probably exactly what he had in mind.