Eighth Grade (2018)

I remember Jr. High School. I remember how I used to dress with my flare jeans, flip flops, Aeropostale shirts, puka shell necklaces, no makeup and a low ponytail. I played soccer and basketball. I had friends, but I wasn't popular. I wasn't bullied, but I wasn't the epitome of hot like I sometimes wished I were. I pretended like I was confident, like no one's opinion mattered. Most of the time, it didn't. I did my own thing. But there were those moments, alone in my room, when I would look at myself in the mirror and see everything that I wasn't.

Middle-school student Kayla is on the brink of finishing eighth grade and entering high school. She has her own YouTube channel where she gives out sincere advice to growing kids trying to find their place in the world. She is labeled as the "most quiet" girl in her grade and aims to change people's perception of her by making more friends and becoming more confident.

"Eighth Grade" is one of the most painful movies I've ever watched because I could wholeheartedly relate to it. Literally middle and jr. high school is the worst. It's so hard to feel misunderstood and to not understand the world either. It's hard to have a changing body at the same time as your other peers have changing bodies. It's hard to have an excess of hormones and not know what to do with them. It's hard to not have money to dress cute or to have acne or to be quiet. It's hard not to know the right words to say to make a friend. It's just hard.

Writer/Director Bo Burnham, a YouTube star turned filmmaker, has managed to make this film incredibly accessible by bringing his gritty, DIY feel to the screen. Every shot of the school, Kayla's house, or the mall feels so completely ordinary that he could be filming my own life for all I know. But where he truly proves himself is in the way he has the characters interact one with another. The way how Kayla stutters over her words to an intimidating peer in one scene and mouths off to her father in the next is so completely real - complete with a poor father's faltering "what did I do?" face and hesitant laugh to desperately try to remind his daughter that he's on her side. Each scene's vibe perfectly matches the relationship the characters have with one another.

Of course, every single scene is excruciatingly designed to strike painful empathy in the audience. Elsie Fisher plays the young, reticent middle-schooler whose performance is absolutely remarkable. Seeing her private life - her videos to remind herself of who she wants to be and her lists of "how to be more confident" - and her public life of painful dialogue and obvious sincere desire to have just one friend is so spot on the nose. Every other minute I was shaking my head exclaiming "oh, honey."

"You can't be brave without being scared," Kayla says in one of her YouTube videos. Fisher brings a perfectly painful subtlety to the growing pains we watch on screen. Her performance is a revelation. I don't think I have ever felt so seen. 9/10
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