Afterschool

Afterschool (2009) is Antonio Campos's debut feature you can watch online on iFILM. Robert, a withdrawn student at an elite boarding school, happens to be filming when two classmates die in the hallway right in front of him.

The school asks the quiet teenager to cut together a memorial video. But Robert was raised on internet clips and porn; he experiences the world through a lens and can't quite feel anything straight, so his tribute only reopens the wound. Ezra Miller, in a first major role, plays the detachment of a generation for whom the screen is more real than the room.

Campos — who'd go on to make Christine and The Devil All the Time — shoots this cold and clinical: long static frames, heads cropped out of frame, an unsettling absence where music should be. This isn't comfort viewing. It's a hard, deliberately alienating film about digital numbness and adolescent isolation that argues with you instead of soothing you. Stream Afterschool (2009) online on iFILM.