Eighth Grade

EIGHTH GRADE   ***1/2

Bo Burnham

2018

IDEA:  The diffident Kayla Day struggles to find confidence and a sense of belonging during the final week of eighth grade.

BLURB:  In 90 minutes of screen time and one condensed week in the life of a 14-year-old, Eighth Grade distills the amorphousness and confusion of early adolescent identity. Kayla Day, played by Elsie Fisher with impressively prodigious inelegance, navigates this murky territory the only way she knows how: through social media. Her vlogs provide her a site through which she can present a self-image she is unable to exhibit in person. Despite its putative social function, Burnham crucially understands these vlogs as being primarily in service of the creator, a form of ego-projection that allows Kayla to identify with a version of herself that is more coherent, and aspirational, than the one she fumbles to realize in real life. Eighth Grade gets the combination of effacement and visibility that characterizes such media use, and more generally the embarrassments that come with negotiating an inchoate self-concept, online or otherwise. But what ultimately makes the film so resonant is the eternal applicability of the feelings it portrays. For Burnham, eighth grade is not so much a discrete chapter of perishable experience as a microcosm of existential uncertainties that resurface throughout life. The familiar angsty waves of apprehension may find their most concentrated expression in the pubescent Kayla, but they cannot be solely attributed to a “phase.” Beyond the demo and idiom it so empathetically renders, Eighth Grade is wisest in its recognition of life as a continual process of transition, and change as the often ungainly necessity of our ongoing maturation.