Elsie Fisher plays Kayla Day,who spends hours delivering her views on what it is to be a teenager via her internet blog,in Eighth Grade.Credit:Linda Kallerus
Its writer-director is a prime example of the breed,having kick-started his career as a comedian with a series of YouTube videos shot in his bedroom when he was 17 and still at school.
At the time,The Boston Globe described their effect as"simultaneously wholesome and disturbing,intimate in a folksy,creepy sort of way"– which,I suppose,could be called an endorsement. It certainly didn't hurt Burnham's chances. He soon had an agent,along with a booking with Comedy Central. He was on his way.
Eighth Grade's Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) has far to go before she can entertain these kinds of aspirations. She's an excruciatingly shy 13-year-old with pimples,a slouch and an inability to finish a sentence without repeating the words"like"and"you know"a dozen times.
At school,she rarely speaks,yet at home in her room,she spends hours delivering her views on what it is to be a teenager via her internet blog.
Her aim is to convince her viewers of the unreliable nature of flesh-and-blood reality. She is not the person that her schoolmates have labelled the quietest member of the class. Her real self is the one that they see on their screens – talkative,outgoing and full of fun.
Well,if you allow for exaggeration. At best,her screen self is a slightly more animated version of the girl she is in life. The pauses,the tone-deaf non-sequiturs and the overall awkwardness have not been miraculously erased. She's the female equivalent of an adolescent boy whose voice is about to break. In time,he will gain poise and self-confidence,but at the moment,he's not sure what sound is about to come out of his mouth.
There are stretches of exquisite boredom as we watch Kayla struggling to express her hard-won insights into the pains and obligations of an adolescent about to move into high school. Yet she's a refreshing change from the misunderstood but still perky teenagers who populate most American school movies.