eighth grade (2018)

By Lily Coghlan

If you were given the opportunity to go back and relive every upsetting, cringeworthy, humiliating moment that you experienced in middle school, would you? I think it’s fair to assume that the nearly universal answer to this question is a hard NO, and yet the musician/comedian/filmmaker Bo Burnham decided that this is exactly what audiences want. While I understand that he’s attempting to display the horrors of being a young teenager through a quirky coming-of-age story, he missed the mark by miles. Elsie Fisher gives the performance of a lifetime, so much so that watching her attempt to fit in with her peers and fail miserably is skin-crawling. But I mean, what does Burnham  know about being a thirteen year-old girl? Not to mention his problematic writing, in which he tries to examine Kayla’s first sexual encounters through her pubescent eyes. While I’m not saying there’s no place for stories that expose the harsh realities of being a tween, Burnham was not the right person to tell this story, and I’ll hold it against him for a very long time.