Review: Eighth Grade (2018)

Pitch meetings for comedian Bo Burnham’s excellent, nearly unwatchable Eighth Grade (2018) must have been weird. How do you sell people on a movie about a time most would rather pay to forget than to see? Yet the film works, in part due to Elsie Fisher’s grounded, honest performance as Kayla Day, the awkward, anxious middle schooler living in all of us.

Eighth Grade is as much about the internet as it is about middle school. We see Kayla sit through grueling assemblies, chaotic sex ed classes, and lonely lunches, but we also – constantly – see her scroll through the land of 1s and 0s. We watch her stalk classmates’ Instagram feeds, use Snapchat filters, and struggle with self-image. Like Burnham’s YouTube beginnings, Kayla uploads videos of herself to the platform, albeit for a much smaller audience.

YouTube, perhaps, provides a space for Kayla to be herself. This read feels like a simplified view of the internet. YouTube Kayla is not Kayla, it’s a highly curated version of Kayla. In one video titled “putting yourself out there,” she discusses inviting a shy girl to her pool party. Offline, Kayla is the shy girl at the pool party. Her bathroom panic attack goes unmentioned to her followers. By the end, Kayla uploads a more honest monologue to her channel, but this is the culmination of befriending dorky Gabe (Jake Ryan), hanging out with high schoolers, and standing up to the mean girls rather than growth facilitated by her online community.

At school and online, Kayla’s walls are up. They might still be up around the dinner table, but her dad (Josh Hamilton) sees right through them. His ability to provide helpful advice is another story, yet it’s through her relationship with her father that we get to see who Kayla really is. Here, she’s given the room to yell, to panic, to be comforted.

Burnham’s dialogue cleverly clues us in to what’s going unsaid or what’s difficult to say. When her father secretly follows her at the mall, she freaks out. “I didn’t mean to spy on you. I just suck,” he says, offering her money. Much of Kayla’s inner fears and anxieties are expressed through their inability to communicate their feelings to each other.

Kayla’s worry that she is awkward, uncool, or even unlovable bubbles to the surface most poignantly in scenes with her dad. After asking him to help her burn her elementary school time capsule in the backyard, she asks him: “Do I make you sad?” It’s heartbreaking moments like these where we see Kayla, barriers down, and perhaps Burnham’s own anxieties about growing up online.

*** Originally written for CTCS 402: Practicum in Film and Television Criticism