After making a splash with his stylish thriller about female obsession, Faultless, writer-director Sébastien Marnier now looks towards a bleaker and more provocative existential thriller that’s part Dead Poets Society, part Village of the Damned, sprinkled with a dose of Take Shelter and served with a side of Children of the Corn.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Christophe Dufosse, we begin as most tales do, with a teacher who throws himself out of a window in the middle of class. For the rest of the film, we follow Pierre (Laurent Lafitte, who also played the creepy neighbour in Elle) as he is brought by a prestigious French institute to serve as a substitute teacher. His students? Top of the line rich kids in an intellectually advanced class. The kind that has never wanted for anything in their lives, have huge entitlement issues, and are emotionally cold as ice, which makes the rest of the school despise them. Pierre quickly finds that he even has to keep changing his teaching plan, as the kids are years ahead of the other classes.
The class is lead by a group of six kids who get the best grades. Soon, Pierre starts noticing little things, like the kid who keeps being beaten up while no one cares, and how secretive and protective the core group is. Once he starts following, things get more sinister and School’s Out gets tense, as Pierre starts to suspect the kids are monitoring him, and maybe his predecessor’s suicide attempt wasn’t so random. Their constant after-school meetings at a quarry, the kids beating each other up in total silence, the sinister manifesto-like DVDs with shocking footage of animal slaughter, terrorism, and environmental catastrophes don’t help convince us that these are just innocent, ordinary kids.
The performances in School’s Out are plain fantastic. Laffite plays the hell out of Pierre’s increasing paranoia, as he not only gets more disturbing clues to the kids’ plans for graduation night, but starts getting calls in the middle of the night, and cockroaches start invading his apartment – that he is also writing a dissertation on Franz Kafka may be too obvious to be a coincidence. It is the kids to are the stars of the film, however, particularly the leaders of the group, Apolline and Dimitri. Luàna Bajrami plays Apolline as if she was a character straight from Village of the Damned, only way more intelligent and manipulative, and Victor Bonnel’s Dimitri looks like a grown-up male version of The Shining twins, with a delicate build that hides a sinister gaze.
Sébastien Marnier keeps the tension going by making the audience question Pierre’s sanity and whether he’s actually seeing these things. It’s a perfect example in building tension without really showing anything, mostly through atmosphere, visuals and sound. Key to this is an electronic score by Zombie Zombie that evokes 80’s horror films, mostly Carpenter’s, with great success. Unfortunately, this backfires towards the third act, as the vagueness of the mystery makes the payoff too confusing to appreciate.
School’s Out also deals with existential dread and the question of how children have become desensitized yet traumatized by the state of the world they are supposed to inherit, with a final scene that will spark plenty of conversations.
