Drifting Out of Focus

The Coens' "A Serious Man" and Antonio Campos' "Afterschool" kick up some dirt.

Antonio Campos was 24 when he directed “Afterschool,” but it doesn’t feel like the work of a young filmmaker. In part, that’s because he borrows heavily from directors decades his senior. The long, unmoving shots of high school corridors inevitably recall Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” and the use of video to complicate the audience’s relationship as well as the disturbing events on screen are straight out of the Michael Haneke playbook. But Campos, who has twice screened short films at Cannes and developed “Afterschool” at the festival’s Cinéfondation residency, has developed a style of his own, one that owes as much to video installations as it does to cinematic narrative.

Campos’ approach is one of extreme restriction. The camera never moves, and he stages his scenes so that sometimes only silvers of the actors’ bodies are inside the frame. He shoots in cramped close-ups and remote long shots, but rarely in the middle distance where conventional films plant their tripods. He doesn’t want a shot to go by without us thinking about what we’re seeing, and what we’re not.

The film’s story, unfortunately, isn’t as sophisticated as its visuals. It centers on Robert (Ezra Miller), a shy prep school student whose most intimate relationship is with his desktop computer. His roommate, a gangly, shaggy kid, deals drugs to the student body, and is consequently popular with everyone, including the leggy blond twins uniformly referred to as “the Talberts.”

Sometimes, as when the camera sections off bits of Robert’s English teacher, observing her body in discrete packets as she reads from “Hamlet” (“The play’s the thing…”), Campos is clearly adopting Robert’s point of view — literally so once Robert joins the school’s video club. But at others, Campos merely seems to be searching for an arbitrarily alienated point of view. He has said one of his major inspirations was a retrospective of documentaries by Frederick Wiseman, whose surname he borrows for the video club’s advisor. But Wiseman’s long takes are designed to suck the audience in, not hold them at arm’s length.

One day, while filming B-roll for the video club’s class project, Robert captures the distant figures of two girls spilling from a classroom door, their voices choked with pain. Although he rushes in to help them, the camera stays put so that the vast majority of the screen is filled with empty space and the events at the other end of the hallway remain opaque. Only later do we learn that the girls were the Talberts, and that they were killed by cocaine laced with some kind of poison.

Based on the creepy vibes Robert has been emitting since the first scene, where he masturbates to an internet video of a woman being choked during sex, the obvious implication is that Robert somehow doctored his roommate’s stash, which means that much of the movie’s remaining half is spent waiting for the other shoe to drop. To be fair, it doesn’t land exactly where you’d expect, but the movie’s equation of virtual violence and real-world trauma still comes off as glib, a young man’s attempt to seem old beyond his years. “Afterschool” is stunning to watch, due in large part to Jody Lee Lipes’ cinematography, but once the screen goes dark, it’s gone.

Sam Adams is our guest critic for the month of September.

“A Serious Man” opens in limited release on October 2nd; “Afterschool” opens in New York and will be available on VOD on October 2nd.

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