It’s the last week of eighth grade, and high school looms on the horizon. Thirteen-year-old Kayla Day just wants to live her best life — but her crippling anxiety gets in the way at every turn. It’s brutal, it’s cringe-worthy, it’s completely realistic.
This is the premise of Eighth Grade, a feature film that debuted on July 13 in only four theaters in New York and Los Angeles — yet had an impressive opening weekend — and currently has a coveted 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, as of press time. Produced by A24, the indie company behind films including Lady Bird, Moonlight, and The Florida Project, Eighth Grade is the directorial debut of 27-year-old comedian Bo Burnham. He also penned the script.
There’s a reason Eighth Grade is resonating so strongly with audiences. It genuinely depicts the confusing, transitional nature of adolescence, when everything’s in flux and nothing seems certain. Further, it demonstrates the huge, sometimes detrimental, role that social media plays in the development of young egos today.
Elsie Fisher fearlessly portrays the insecurity and awkwardness of adolescence as Kayla, a social media-obsessed teen with no friends and only a single dad, Mark (Josh Hamilton), to keep her company. Not that she wants his company: She spends every waking minute on her phone or laptop, scrolling Instagram and Twitter and watching makeup tutorials to prep for the perfect Snapchat selfie.
Kayla even has a YouTube channel full of videos offering advice on topics like being yourself, putting yourself out there, how to be confident, and more — signing off each one with her signature tagline: “Gucci!”
The problem is, Kayla can talk the talk, but she can’t necessarily walk the walk — as she admits near the end of the film while announcing that she’s taking a hiatus from filming. She wants confidence, friends, and a boyfriend, but going through the motions of being a teen seems extraordinarily difficult for her.
She muses at one point: “I’m really like nervous all the time. … It’s like I’m waiting in line for like a roller coaster and that stupid like butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling you get. I get that all the time. And then I never get the feeling after you ride the roller coaster.” If only she knew how alone she is not when it comes to adolescent anxiety.
Long stretches of silence underscore Kayla’s loneliness and isolation, interspersed with well placed songs — like the entrancing, bass-heavy leitmotif of her crush, Aiden (Luke Prael), or Enya’s “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)” as she mindlessly drowns herself in social media while alone in her room.
And Burnham isn’t afraid to get the camera right up in Fisher’s face — reveling in her acne, imperfect teeth, and inability to maintain eye contact with the camera. It authentically embraces the fact that this is a movie about a young teen played by an actual young teen. Something we don’t often get to see in popular culture.
When popular girl Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere) begrudgingly invites Kayla to a pool party, Kayla musters the courage to attend, trying to “put herself out there” as her father suggested. She has a panic attack while changing into her swimsuit in a powder room and then approaches the backyard with dread, surveying the raucous party like it’s a battlefield.
Kayla slouches her way into the pool and looks around. No one seems to notice her, and this is another recurring theme: the sense that Kayla is invisible. When she tries to engage other students, they don’t acknowledge her or look up from their phones. As a viewer, you eventually start to wonder if the problem isn’t Kayla herself but the other teens around her.
Things start to look up about halfway through the film when Kayla befriends a genuinely nice high school senior, Olivia (Emily Robinson), during a high school shadowing day. And, by the end, Kayla seems to find a kindred spirit in Gabe (Jake Ryan), Kennedy’s nerdy cousin whom she briefly met at the pool party.
Early in the film, Kayla’s class opens time capsules that they made in sixth grade. As the peruses hers, Kayla seems disgusted and embarrassed — whether with the girl she was or the girl she is. Later, after an uncomfortable encounter with a high school boy and deciding to end her YouTube channel, she burns the box in her backyard.
However, as the movie closes, Kayla is making a new time capsule — one that she’ll open upon high school graduation. In a video to her future self, she talks about moving forward and how things in life inevitably change. Signing off, she says: “Stay cool. I can’t wait to be you.”
At the very least, it seems Kayla is finally giving herself a break, allowing herself to be who she is now and looking with hope to who she will be later. At most, she has come to grips with the fact that she can never quite know what sort of woman (or even 16-year-old) she will become and that the turbulent ride of adolescence is fueled, in part, by that anticipation. Either way, we have a feeling Kayla is going to be just fine.
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