Junior high is worse than you remember in Eighth Grade.
WATCHING BO BURNHAM’S DEBUT FEATURE, Eighth Grade, you might realize more vividly than ever what all great teenage coming-of-age stories have in common: unbearable levels of anxiety. The movie chronicles the last week of middle school for a 13-year-old girl named Kayla (Elsie Fisher), and—spoiler alert—not a huge amount happens, and everything that does feels momentous.
In the opening scene, Kayla addresses the camera, talking not to the movie audience but the peers she hopes are watching her latest YouTube video (though her views, alas, are in the low single digits). Kayla talks desperately fast, as if to keep people from turning her off, glancing down from time to time at a paper, saying “like” a lot, wanting everyone to know that although people think she’s quiet, she’s really “funny and cool and talkative” and that the message she wants to share is how important it is not to “change yourself to impress someone else.” She signs off with a brand name—“Gucci!”—and then shuts down the camera, wilting, eaten up by loneliness. Later, Kayla says that life is about “putting yourself out there—but where is ‘there’?”
Where is “there”? is the existential question both of her age and the age, and Eighth Grade does it justice. Those YouTube videos are pipelines to Kayla’s soul. And Burnham has another brilliant device for evoking her dislocation: a box that she buried at the end of sixth grade containing memorabilia, as well as a SpongeBob flash drive with a video message to her end-of-eighth-grade self. The cover of the box reads, “To the coolest girl in the world,” but the Kayla who called herself that isn’t the Kayla who’s reading those words now and radiating awkwardness.
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