Movie Review: "Eighth Grade" Gets Everything Right

There is too much truth in this art.

Can I warn readers that Eighth Grade is the most triggering experience of recent memory while also recommending it as highly as is humanly possible?

Whether you’re in high school or out of it, Eighth Grade locates and presses on pretty much every lingering adolescent pain point you’ve got buried, and then a few more you never realised you had.

It finds a way to talk about anxiety and shyness and puberty in piercing new ways, giving young people the words to convey what even adults still can only say inarticulately.

And it was written and directed by Bo Burnham, a teenage YouTube star turned innovative stand-up comedian turned, well, I guess you’d call him suddenly one of the best filmmakers around. And he’s not even the star.

That’d be the astonishing Elsie Fisher, who plays Kayla, a 13-year-old in the final week of eighth grade at an anonymous American middle school, waiting to grow up and finally become who she’d always meant to be. The picture opens in extreme close up on Kayla as she delivers a clumsy—though earnest—monologue for her YouTube audience of absolutely no one. Often, we see her illuminated by her phone screen, and the very first time that happens, it directly lights up her pockmarked skin. Fittingly, Fisher plays Kayla like a big, open, vulnerable pore. Her vulnerabilities are further exposed when she’s handed back a time capsule from sixth grade, addressed "to the coolest girl in the world". That prediction didn’t pan out, she concedes.

Seemingly without a friend in the world—her single dad (a lovely and loving Josh Hamilton) doesn’t count—Kayla embarks on a mission to "put herself out there". What this means is everyone watching will look on at her well-meaning yet disastrous attempts, terrified, wanting to scoop her up and get her the hell out of this movie.

Of course, it is a movie, and the way Burnham has directed his past comedy specials always highlighted the artifice of presentation. However, Eighth Grade is all too real. It’s a minor miracle he was able to fuse his heightened and extremely stylised combination of jarring musical cues and broad, inappropriate comedy with the naturalistic and sometimes terrifying drama of teenagerdom. There is no identity crisis behind the camera, and Burnham’s collaborators are moving together in unison.

Eighth Grade has huge laughs, well-paced (as you’d expect from a stand-up comedian), in scenarios seemingly designed to make us cringe for poor Kayla, and ourselves. She’s invited, reluctantly, to a pool party; she takes it upon herself to do some online sex-ed research. It all goes poorly. The laughter transitions to the awkward kind, or, simply, to tears. Late in the flick, she gets to feel grown-up when she shadows a high schooler, only to learn in the backseat of an older boy's car that growing-up has other dangers (for women, especially), in an absolute horror-show of a sequence.

Ultimately, Eighth Grade isn’t just here to pick at old sores like pimples. It’s a loving tribute to young people who go unseen, or whose voices get unfairly stifled. It gives us Kayla, a flesh-and-blood person for whom you care deeply, brought to life by the magic of the movies. And through her, you think about what you went through, and what your parents went through, and maybe one day what your own kids will go through.

Burnham and Fisher didn’t just make a film; they gave us a time capsule too. It's perfect.

5/5

In select Australian cinemas 3 January 2019 (Luna Leederville in WA; Cinema Nova & Elsternwick Classic in VIC; Dendy Newtown & Palace Chauvel Cinema in NSW; and Palace Nova East End Cinema in SA). Rated M for sexual references and coarse language.