Eighth Grade opens with an admission from its protagonist. “I haven’t been getting a lot of views on my videos,” says Kayla (Elsie Fisher), all but begging for attention.
Only weeks from graduating eighth grade, Kayla refuses to acknowledge her shyness, a condition aggravated by acne and a propensity to baby fat. She earnestly wants her videos to be helpful as well as important by choosing peer-directed topics such as “Be Yourself”: “It’s, like, not changing yourself to impress someone,” she opines, accurately enough. Although she is her only apparent audience member, like an essayist, she uses her medium in an effort to gain self-understanding—to work out the problems of adolescence compounded by the problem of not fitting in.
Fisher marvelously captures the less-than-well-spoken speech of a kid growing up in an increasingly nonverbal society. Kayla wakes to a cheery good-morning jingle from her phone; she’s plugged into music and working her thumbs through dinner with dad (Josh Hamilton), a dorky if well-intentioned man who, by insisting that Kayla is special, seems only to set a bar she cannot reach when compared to her classmates. Kayla’s dreams are as virtual as her life.
After two dreary disappointing years in middle school, the end is in sight. Trudging against the tide of her fellow students in the hallway, Kayla makes her way to the eighth-grade assembly where, between shrill feedback from the microphone, the assistant principal recites the results of a student survey. Kayla’s face sinks upon learning that she has been voted “Most Quiet.” Characteristically she is the least important member of the school orchestra as it labors through a discordant “Star Spangled Banner.” Kayla’s role is to slap together a pair of cymbals to emphasize the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air.
When forced to attend the birthday party of the class’ popular girl, Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), Kayla panics. She stares for many minutes through the glass patio door at the socially adept kids romping around the pool. And when it comes time to present the princess with her birthday gift, anxiety mounts—as it does many times in Eighth Grade—in anticipation over Kayla’s social embarrassment.
While maintaining a light and funny tone, Eighth Grade looks at a familiar set of difficulties, including learning to distinguish social acceptance from true friendship (while developing self-identity) during the rite of passage from middle to high school. In his feature film debut, writer-director Bo Burnham casts a light on how those challenges have been shot full of steroids through the pressure of social media and even asks whether the mental wiring of every nano-generation differs from its predecessors through the continual flux of technology. Eighth Grade is entertaining and meaningful, filled with characters that will remind most of us of people we have known or people we have been.
