Jaden Jordan
- Aug 10, 2021
- 3 min read

Extracurricular (2018)

The Breakdown: A group of teens looking for a thrill take to murder after class, but as they grow as people and the police start closing in, tensions rise and things begin to unravel.

Watch If: You like a slow, tense thriller that lets you see the character's lives fall apart piece by piece.

Not If: You're after gore and pure horror.

SECONDARY FACTS

Overall Rating: 3.4

Length: 1:30

Country: Canada

Language: English

Gore Factor: 2/5

REVIEW

THE QUICK AND DIRTY

This dread-fuelled ride-along is an atmospheric thriller that lets you see the drama before it unfolds, and utilizes that to keep you watching.

PREMISE: 3

Teenagers deciding to kill people for kicks. It's a premise I've seen time and time again, but very rarely outside of the scope of horror/comedy. This film is not a comedy. It solidly in the thriller sub-genre. Extracurricular has enough oomph to push it into the horror side of thriller, but its real claim to fame is that it manages to take an incredibly simplistic idea, and inject it with just enough tension to turn its overt predictability into dread.

ACTING: 4

With the exception of typecasting, it's actually not easy to convey personality through presentation alone, and panic-crying in a way that avoids falling into the cringe zone is borderline impossible. Managing to achieve both of those, it's fair to say that the cast of this film excelled.

The premise of the film alone lends itself to a less than serious interpretation, you know because people can't take teenagers seriously. If any of the actors had failed to deliver, the tone of the film would have been lost, and the entire movie would have fallen into the sand trap of overt mediocrity.

AUDIO AND VISUALS: 4

Extracurricular resists the temptation of complicated visual effects, and that's what elevates the visuals. The lack of visual entanglement throughout the majority of the film permits the creative ingenuity that the few effects do possess to really shine.

Similarly, the score is neither overly dramatic nor complex. but when it does call itself to notice, I found it nothing short of delightful. It does what a soundtrack should: it boosts tension and propels the atmosphere without forcing itself into the spotlight.

ATMOSPHERE: 3

This film does an excellent job of engrossing its audience... when things are happening. At some point, just passed halfway, I went from pretty bored to fully engrossed without noticing the shift. But make no mistake, the middle part of this film, where they're introducing the characters in-depth, is a bit of a slough.

In the latter half of the film, though, the steady, well-measured dread manages to unspool the film with a soft yet intense cadence so effectively that the tone is absolutely tangible in every subsequent scene.

DELIVERY: 3

To say this film gets off to a slow start is an after-statement, and, despite all its intensity, it is before all else, predictable.

The atmosphere and the originality go a long way, and the teenagers do feel like teenagers, down to the edgey one's fundamentally flawed interpretation of Nietzsche. The characters feel like characters, as opposed to the mock cut out stereotypes that the boomers in Hollywood seem to think teenagers are.