Eighth Grade: Authentic, raw teen movie you can relate to

We’re all familiar with the teen movies with sex-crazed 17-year-olds making pacts and bad bets. This isn’t that film.

No one should ever be given the “Most Quiet” award at a school.

Who really wins from that? Not the person on the receiving end, who’s just been told that they’re essentially invisible and definitely disposable.

It’s certainly not what 13-year-old Kayla Day wanted, being bequeathed this dubious honour in the last week of middle school. Her hurt, her desire to disappear in that moment is written so clearly across the expressive face of young actor Elsie Fisher in a stunning, breakout performance.

Eighth Grade is one of the most thoughtful and nuanced films made about the teenage experience, an authentic story of angst, anxiety and confusion — in other words, what it’s like to be 13 years old.

 

Movies about teenagers tend to focus on sex-crazed 17-year-olds looking for a last hurrah with their buddies before university, or trying to win some ill-conceived, smug bet.

Eighth Grade is not that movie.

Written and directed by Bo Burnham, a 28-year-old comedian whose own big break came on YouTube as an irreverent teenager, Eighth Grade captures with extraordinary empathy what it’s like to be a 13-year-old introvert when society demands you share absolutely everything about yourself with everyone across everything.

Kayla too makes YouTube videos, short clips with self-help platitudes like “everything will work out if you’re being yourself”. But, like at school, no one is watching her.

Despite the groan-worthiness of her advice, a reflection of the false-hope “wellness” industry preying on the insecure and lost, Kayla’s belief in it is not presented as glib. She, and Eighth Grade, is earnest without being too self-serious.

MORE: Bo Burnham on why he can relate to 13-year-old girls

 

She may be able to smile at the camera and project confidence when she’s alone in her room, but out there in the world she’s burdened with social anxiety, unable to “fake” the courage she so desperately wished she had, dealing with mean girls, her well-meaning single dad (Josh Hamilton) and the boy she likes.

Kayla isn’t “cool” and she isn’t “uncool”, she’s just another teenager walking down the school hall with her shoulders hunched, eyes averted to the ground, trying to get through the day.

Eighth Grade feels like a truthful vivisection of anxiety, of being overwhelmed by something you can’t control and that, on the surface, isn’t even noticeable.

For anyone who’s never personally experienced social anxiety, they’ll still be able to relate to that moment when you walk into a room full of people and you don’t think you belong there. What Eighth Grade does is cleverly evoke those feelings with such vividness to draw on your compassion.

Burnham has said he has suffered from anxiety since he was 20 and has even performed whole comedy routines on stage when on the inside he’s screaming. That kind of lived experience is something that has informed the authenticity of his movie.

 

This film is so clearly behind its teen hero and her perspective on the world — even every adult character other than her father is framed as a semi-blur in the distance or cropped without their heads; their significance in Kayla’s life reduced to the periphery, like most adults are to teenagers.

Eighth Grade also trades in some heady concepts even adults can’t process, let alone insecure teens with hormones running mad — namely, the disconnect between how you see yourself versus how people see you, and the fear that people might actually see the you the way you don’t want to be seen.

For Kayla, being named “Most Quiet” is that fear manifested.

Despite its depth, Eighth Grade isn’t a heavy film — partly because Fisher is so eminently watchable and partly because Burnham has made the movie to be emotionally relatable, no matter how old you are.

You frequently hear people say, “It must be so hard growing up right now, with all that technology,” but what Eighth Grade shows is that, yes, this generation of teens have social media, but what these insecurity-filled hormone-monsters are going through is not so different from where we’ve all been before.

Rating: ★★★★

Eighth Grade is in cinemas now

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