At first, we wonder what’s got into 24 year old Antonio Campos, director (as well as scriptwriter and editor) of this brilliant first film with its images of video gags and trashy porn bathed in the darkness of Scope, quirky framing, still shots of feet, etc. This focus on the formal, that looks at first like youthful folly, soon gains in substance. These images that seem “badly made” paradoxically reveal the presence of a real filmmaker. The question is who is he and why is he filming.

Let’s start at the beginning. In an upper class American boarding school, Robert, a stubborn, sex obsessed, teen loner masturbates in front of porn videos in his room while his buddy Dave deals cocaine. Elsewhere, students line up in a long corridor where they are given medication. At the canteen, one says, “You know, I fucked your sister,” “That’s coke whores for you.” says another, the way you’d say, “Pass the salt.” Meanwhile the school principal regularly reminds everyone of the school’s gentle ethics in a setting that looks like a chapel with a flag.
Then suddenly death rears its ugly head. The Thalbert sisters, pretty young twins who are the school’s muses, overdose in front of Robert’s camera. He is there by accident, fascinated, shocked or stunned - it is hard to say.
Up until then, there’s nothing new under the sun in this teen chronicle of the unease of the wealthy. Except that what interests Antonio Campos are the images.
These are the film’s real heroes; enigmatic, omnipresent and disturbing. They are pumped out by YouTube, picked up by cell phones, recorded by Robert for his video workshop or forbidden by the institution to save its reputation and its wealthy clients.
The director uses many sources and presents banal or terrible images on the same level. He seeks out reality but is aware it always slips away from him. Yet the film that Robert makes at the school’s request about the Thalbert sisters, with its flaws, its silences and the parents who suddenly have nothing to say, seems more ”true” than the empty, reedited film that ends up being shown to the school assembly with its endless repetition of “I will miss you,” over grandiloquent music.
If there is trauma it is in this camouflage; the gentle, muffled hushing-up, that like the medication handed out to the students is supposed to prevent anyone getting upset.
The images, like urges, keep coming. And Antonio Campos, like his stubborn hero, keeps following them, like an attentive and disturbing entomologist.

Emmanuelle Mougne