Robert (Ezra Miller) is a young American student at an elite East Coast preparatory school who accidentally captures on camera the tragic death of two classmates.
Antonio Campos, who made the controversial short film Buy it Now about a girl selling her virginity on eBay, demonstrates his remarkable talents to a larger audience with this impressive feature debut. Set in a respectable American boarding school, the movie looks at the affect the YouTube generation of kids can have on society, and how living a life in a world of video clips can distort reality. This isn't an "oh, those kids are up to no good" kind of film, and doesn't pander to the more tabloid side of the issue of recording fights and "happy slapping". But muster up an eerie and rather menacing sense of danger about the subject of internet videos and explores a terrible event in the eyes of a internet-addicted student.
This student is Robert. He loves video clips, and spends a lot of time in his dorm watching all sorts of weird pixelated short films online. The opening of the film gives us a sequence of videos that have appeared on sharing sites in recent years - some violently cruel, some sexual, some disturbing (Saddam's hanging is featured). We are then treated to a sleazy and upsetting amateur porn video, where a girl is made to say hello to her mum on camera before having intercourse with an off-screen male (who's presumably filming the act himself). We then cut to a darkened bedroom, where Robert is masturbating to the seedy video. His obsessive attitude towards this form of entertainment - whether it comes from the need for sexual gratification or a curious fascination - is summed up in this short but memorable scene. His roommates don't seem to share his fascination, and treat him with contempt. He isn't a complete loner though, and finds company in his attractive roommate Dave and his sort-of-girlfriend (she loses her virginity to Robert in the grounds of the school one sunny afternoon).
Robert uses the after school's video club, which lets students use video cameras to make short films, to indulge his love for bitesize footage. During the making of one of these filming endeavours (a static shot of an empty corridor), something horrific happens. Two girls appear in the corridor. They appear to be in pain and collapse to the ground making desperate sounds. They die of impure cocaine abuse, and their horribly distressing final moments are captured in Robert's film. After this event, Robert's life becomes very strange. He discovers his roommate may have a connection to the drugs the girls had taken moments before they died. He also gets the impression he isn't the only one who may have been filming that day, and somebody somewhere may also be compiling clips of the students in the school for their own agenda.
With noticeable parallels to Michael Haneke's work, and more than a few echoes of Gus Van Sant, this cold and disturbing film cooks up a vat of uneasy tension that is electric to watch. Campos, who with this has made one of the most exceptional first features of recent years, should be commended for keeping the drama understated and almost minimalistic without it seeming pretentious or turgid. Deftly handled, quietly topical and seriously disquieting, this is a near masterpiece. We can expect great things from Antonio Campos in the future.
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First time director Antonio Campos's downbeat tale of teenage alienation in which a public school pupil confronts death in the digital age. High school loner Robert (Ezra Miller) spends his spare time surfing the net for hardcore pornography and random clips of unrelated items that appeal to him. Given a digital video camera to record footage for an audiovisual class, Robert happens to be present when two popular girl students accidentally die from a drugs overdose. With the school in mourning, Robert is given the job of producing the school's official memorial video. But as he becomes immersed in his task, he soon finds himself becoming even more alienated from those around him.
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