"You must go and see Eighth Grade, in fact, every dad with a teenaged daughter should go and see it", said my daughter. So, ever the interested and dutiful father I did.
Sitting comfortably in my local cinema, the lights dimmed and from the off, I was propelled into the world of Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher), a bright, seemingly self-assured, acne covered teenager conducting a podcast from her bedroom on one of her daily topics to help boost the confidence to those subscribing to her sparsely populated channel. But we quickly discover that behind the iPhone the truth about Kayla is a very different matter.
Her life is dominated by the blast of social media from every which way, effectively used by writer-director Bo Burnham throughout the film. As a child of the internet age, Kayla is never without her earphones plugged into all of the external pressures and influences, so important to the teenager's world. She is the only child in a single parent family, and living with her father, Mark (Josh Hamilton), who gives a beautifully nuanced performance in trying to keep a connection with his daughter but is constantly thwarted by Kayla. Mark's concern for her is palpable.
We follow Kayla in her last week of middle school and witness her attempts to fit in with the cool members of the class, where she is mostly shunned of interest or friendship. All of the embarrassment, bravado, fear, heartache and the sheer stress of being a pubescent teenage girl and one, who at heart, feels under-confident with her appearance and personality, but is desperate to be noticed as an individual, such is the cruelty of the teenage world, so perfectly captured in this funny, sad and moving film.
There is a very touching scene where Kayla says goodbye to her unhappy experience at middle school by burning her collected time capsule box, made three years earlier. She asks her dad to light a fire in the garden and in the warm night, illuminated by the flickering fire, with crickets merrily chirping, Kayla and Mark gaze at the boxed items, as the contents disintegrate. Free of internet disruption, they talk, and at last, there is a beautiful connection between them.
You could say that Eighth Grade is a pre, pre-cursor to Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) and also has a link with Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's Little Miss Sunshine (2006), all three have sensitively trodden similar paths.
I was very pleased I went to see Eighth Grade. My daughter was right, all dads should catch it.
Take a look at the trailer
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