School’s Out [L’heure de la sortie] **** (2018, Laurent Lafitte, Luàna Bajrami, Emmanuelle Bercot, Victor Bonnel) – Movie Review

School’s Out stars as Monsieur Eric Capadis, the professor of French at the prestigious French College of St Joseph, jumps from the window in the middle of a class. Then the handsome, charming, honourable but a little bit lost 40-year-old temporary teacher Pierre Hoffman (Laurent Lafitte) steps into the breach while the man is in an induced coma. Pierre finds a class of horribly over-gifted children. They are like Stepford Children or Children of the Damned.

They are a very weird bunch indeed, their initial strange behaviour giving on to disrespect, hostility and violence. Because they are in an experimental too-darned-clever class of 12 teenage kids, they are harassed by other students and harass their new teacher too, but that’s nothing to what they start doing to themselves. The school’s staff is a pretty weird lot as well, by the way, though that probably goes without saying. Pierre is the nearest thing to normal.

Co-writer/ director: Sébastien Marnier proceeds with extraordinary confidence and flair. School’s Out [L’heure de la sortie] (2018) is a creepy, provocative thriller that keeps you on edge and guessing throughout, and stays like that after. What’s it all about Sébastien? Darned if I know, but I did enjoy the ride. Lafitte is excellent as the gay teacher. It is great that it is not an issue here. That is just incidental. This film is about something entirely different (I think). It is about young people who have lost all hope in the future of the world. Now that is scary.

Because the screenplay is a winner, I must give an honourable mention to Marnier’s co-writer Elise Griffon.

Marnier’s last film was his feature debut Irréprochable (2016).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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