Wasted on the Young (MA). Director: Ben C. Lucas. Starring: Oliver Ackland, Adelaide Clemens, Alex Russell. 97 minutes
High school. A place where every assignment bears the weight of your future. Where the petty expectations of peers are not petty at all, but are painfully felt. Where, amid the jostling demands of classroom and schoolyard, you are supposed somehow to 'grow up', and become your adult self.
There are good times, too. But in retrospect, high school appears largely to be a kind of penitential ritual that had to be undertaken on the way to escaping the purgatory of adolescence.
At least, that's my experience. But I wonder if it's Ben C. Lucas', too. Certainly, the Australian writer-director's debut film Wasted on the Young offers a nightmarish vision of schoolyard society, drenched in a sense of hellish dread, that to me seems exaggerated but unnervingly familiar.
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The film focuses on a rivalry between rich kid Zack (Russell) and his stepbrother Darren (Ackland). Zack is smart and popular, an elite swimmer, a small-time drug dealer, and unchallenged king of the schoolyard. Darren is a tech whiz, a swimmer, too, but smaller than Zack, both physically and socially.
Zack and his mates take some petty pleasure in tormenting Zack. That is, until one night when, during a drug-and-booze-addled party, Darren's would-be girlfriend, Xandrie (Clemens) is assaulted and left for dead. At which point, the stepbrothers' rivalry kicks into a higher and more perilous gear.
The film's greatest achievements are stylistic. Lucas' film is visually, aurally and cerebrally resplendent. It's as if John Hughes collaborated with James Ellroy to write a screenplay, and then handed it to David Lynch to direct.
In fact, Wasted on the Young is nothing if not an exercise in Lynchian atmospherics. Lucas employs these in order to strangle a sense of menace out of mundane situations.
He achieves this using loads of slow-mo, hallucinatory flourishes, and prolonged, abstract images of, for example, the boys' bodies sluicing through liquid-silver water. Cinematographer Dan Freene has ensured that the imagery is as compelling and disturbing as the story.
Sound, too, is employed to unsettling effect: jolts of loud contemporary music interspersed with artesian oceans of gloomy noise. The film sounds like the incarnation of every adolescent's combined existential angst as it rumbles down the grimy grey-lino corridor of the viewer's psyche.
With increasing disquiet you realise there appear to be no adults in this world. Absentee parents,