Eighth Grade
(2018)Newcomer Elsie Fisher makes her way through the last week of a disastrous eighth grade year in comedian Bo Burnham's feature debut as director.... More
"Eighth-grader Kayla Day (Fisher) always has her phone in hand, hoping to find connections online that might make up for those she’s unable to forge in everyday life. She makes YouTube videos aimed at other adolescents dealing with similar issues—feelings of isolation, anxiety, and invisibility—but after so easily summoning this wisdom and confidence when addressing her (barely existent) audience, Kayla finds it paralysingly difficult to apply in real situations. In the final week of a thus-far-disastrous school year—and with high school looming on the horizon—Kayla struggles to bridge the gap between how she perceives herself and who she believes she should be." (Sundance Film Festival)Hide
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Directed by Bo Burnham (feature debut)
Starring Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson, Missy Yager, Greg Crowe, Deborah Unger, Daniel Zolghadri, Imani Lewis
Written by Bo Burnham
Flicks Review
BY Katie Parker Flicks Writer
Eighth Grade follows 13-year-old Kayla as she navigates the social pitfalls of her last week in middle school. Shy, awkward, a bit pimply and totally neurotic, Kayla is a queasily real portrait of life as a member of Generation Z.... More
Too shy to talk to her classmates and embarrassed by her single father’s attempts to connect, she instead expresses herself primarily via the online void: dispensing baseless advice on her YouTube channel; leaving sweet but inane comments on stranger’s Instagram posts; researching sex acts through nightmarish wiki-hows.
Written and directed by 28-year-old former YouTube star Bo Burnham and starring truly incredible newcomer Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade has an extremely firm grasp on its subject matter—and it shows.
Keenly aware of the way young people (and really all people) are increasingly consumed with the full-time job of self-improvement, Burnham plunges us into Kayla’s state of constant, breathless anxiety. More than happiness, what Kayla wants is to succeed at living the life she pretends to on the internet—a pursuit that only exposes the alienation and cruel individualism that seems to characterise life in the digital age.
With an almost documentary-like realist aesthetic and equal parts comedy and tragedy, how you feel about Eighth Grade’s squirm-inducing verisimilitude could go either way, and even within our small screening reactions varied wildly.
Several people found it laugh out loud funny. My plus-one thought it was boring. I spent the first half in a state of excruciating discomfort, cried all the way through the second and then left with a stress headache.
Though I wouldn’t say I exactly enjoyed this ordeal, Eighth Grade’s take on modern early adolescence is stunning—not only for its cringey honesty and spot-on contemporary specificity, but for the way neither of those things prevent it from being gut-wrenchingly familiar and relatable to anyone who has ever been sad or awkward or a teenager. Hide
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Eighth Grade
BY indoorkid lister
Old, young or somewhere in between everyone will take something different home. Everyone of us has at one point walked in Kayla's shoes. The moments that keep us up at night, Bo Burnham has somehow converted into film. You don't want to miss this, Gucci.
BY arlomclean superstar
Although It did not grab me as much as some coming of age films have of recent years, Eighth Grade still manages to give you the most uncomfortable, cringe worthy film experience of the year, and its not a bad thing.
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The Press Reviews
Nevertheless, thanks to a wonderfully sensitive and bold performance from [Elise] Fisher and some standout work from Burnham behind the camera, Eighth Grade is ultimately an effective-if not exactly revelatory-watch. Full Review
The kind of comedy that hipper parents might just be able to watch with their own offspring and enjoy. Full Review
It might be easy to laugh at Kayla, but Burnham and Fisher endow her with so much pathos that audiences are more likely to feel sympathy. Full Review
Eighth Grade is lovely work, lifted up by a timeless piece of indie wisdom: Keep it real, as cringe-inducing as that can be. Full Review
... a simultaneously harrowing and sweet look at early adolescence. Full Review
"Eighth Grade" shines as, like, a totally spot-on, you know, portrait of Millennial angst and stuff. Full Review
Burnham has tapped into a byproduct of social-media-saturated adolescence that's often overlooked in favour of parental panic and worst-case-scenario horror stories. Full Review
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