EIGHTH GRADE

This directorial debut from comedian-poet-songwriter Bo Burnham looks at a girl in her last year of eighth grade, just before she graduates from middle school to high school. She’s highly active  on social media, posting regular youtube tutorials and trying to prepare just the right Instagram face to start the day, but her real life sees her trying to ignore her over-enthusiastic dad and failing to really fit in with any of the other kids around her. A combination of meeting a high-school mentor and an invite to one of her fellow student’s pool party sees her making a few new contacts, but is she really ready for what the rest of the world has in store for her?

A sharp intimate study of a young woman going through the landmines of what modern social media interactions have in store, this is an astonishing debut – performances are throughout natural and superb from a mostly unknown cast (lead Elise Fisher is best known for voicing Agnes, the youngest and cutest orphan in the Despicable Me films, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen her face before), and there’s a sure shooting style that combines naturalistic presentation with sophisticated montages and  sudden music-drops immediately communicating what’s going on in Kayla’s head and how out of her depth she feels. Teenage-angst is not exactly an unpopular topic in modern film, but in general there tends to be a sense that the kids are playing out a much older creator’s memories of what the angst was like, compete with references to things that were popular when the writer was a teenager – but this feels very much drawn right from the point of view of a contemporary kid. It’s not a tract against social media so much as it is a clear-eyed look at the new challenges it brings to the new generation, and provides exceptional viewing.