THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of on-screen misfits who are overly fond of their video cameras, and now the zeitgeist has gone 2.0 with camera phones cropping up regularly on screen, and voyeurs nursing their YouTube addiction. In the case of Afterschool’s Robert (Ezra Miller), it’s a penchant for the kind of vaguely amusing clips you find on YouTube – babies falling over, piano-playing cats and the like – plus some serious smut he probably shouldn’t be able to access on the computers at his posh boarding school.
Afterschool is a film about watching and being watched. Why does Robert observe and do nothing when popular twin girl seniors die a nasty drugs-related death? And who’s holding the mobile phone that films them? The shots in Afterschool are a mixture of Robert’s filming endeavours for the school video club and footage from several unidentified observers. At times, awkward camera angles obscure the action; whatever the stylistic motivations for this exclusion may be, it becomes frustrating because the zany framing isn’t conducive to our engagement. It’s all very well artfully excluding the viewer from what’s going on, but why should we want to keep watching if we’re pushed out?
There are also some deeply uncomfortable scenes. Robert’s tentative relationship with schoolmate Amy (Addison Timlin) is anything but romantic, from the moment when, inspired by pornography, he grabs her throat, to a fumbling first sex scene that sits somewhere between depressingly realistic and plain depressing.

AT TIMES, Afterschool does feel like an interesting play on the idea of voluntary surveillance, but there’s no real emotional crescendo, no catharsis and no satisfying conclusion to Robert’s angst, which is only ever skirted around. In one scene, he tells the school’s guidance counsellor that he likes watching videos that seem to be real. It seems that just as Robert looks to these videos to find something that is missing from his everyday reality, Antonio Campos is suggesting that Afterschool’s audience could see his film in the same way. A shame, then, that the movie is simply too uninvolving to achieve this aim.