Eighth Grade review: a jaw-droppingly believable Elsie Fisher lends this teen drama a quiet empathy

Dir: Bo Burnham. Cast: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson, Catherine Oliviere, Jake Ryan, Daniel Zolghadri, Fred Hechinger, Imani Lewis, Luke Prael. 15 cert, 94 min

Being 13 years old is a simulacrum of Hell when you carry the burden as seriously as Kayla Day, the unforgettable – if wholly unremarkable – heroine of Eighth Grade. Being cripplingly shy, this ordinary suburban girl has always relied on telling herself that turning another year older is going to make life more bearable. But how do you will into existence a situation where you’re a confident, happy, “normal” teenager, when your whole body seems to outwardly reject that goal?

Kayla is played with jaw-dropping believability by Elsie Fisher, a budding actress discovered on YouTube by the film’s 28-year-old writer-director, Bo Burnham. He claims that every other candidate to audition seemed like a confident girl pretending to be shy, whereas Fisher had the opposite quality, necessary for Kayla, who’s mortified to be voted “Most Quiet” in school.

Kayla makes her own YouTube videos as attempts to boost her position, by showing the bubbly, outgoing side, largely learned from “influencer” culture, that she wishes she could present in person. No one (besides us) is watching these, let alone liking any of them, which makes her persistence in putting them out there both tragic and oddly heroic.

Fisher, let’s just say, is far from your average precocious child performer, and her ability to lose composure on screen, or forget what she’s saying and just as suddenly pick it back up, seems so untutored that we instantly relate to Kayla as an actual person, not a performance.

Every step she takes, as the film follows her hunched figure into class – or to a high-stakes pool party, at the behest of someone’s mom – feels brutally suspenseful, as if she were stumbling onto a plain patrolled by starving wildcats. No wonder her helplessly awkward father (an excellent Josh Hamilton) spies on her from across a shopping mall, making sure she’s OK hanging out with an older group of kids. We feel as protective as he does, and every bit as impotent.

Burnham achieved fame as a singer and stand-up comedian, and mines exquisite hilarity here from the distortions of adolescent obsession, the banal hierarchies of teen social order, and the absurdity of “cool” as a commodity that everyone’s uncoolly desperate to attain.

Boys are often the butt of the laughs: especially the oblivious Aiden (Luke Prael), a dopey classmate with big eyes who gets a bad-ass electro soundtrack whenever Kayla gazes in his direction, and his opposite number Gabe (Jake Ryan), an adorably self-conscious show-off who invites Kayla around for lavish fast food, served lukewarm at opposite ends of his dining table, with two of each dipping sauce and a microwave on standby.

Still, the most refreshing aspect of Eighth Grade winds up being its lack of comic exaggeration – the empathy that Burnham unlocks in lived reality, almost as if the customary snap of the teen movie were a cliché to which these particular characters were trying and failing to live up.

Kayla’s nemesis, the boringly popular Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), might carry herself with unyielding contempt, glued to her smartphone, but the writing gives her none of the devastating put-downs that made, say, Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls such a viper. Kennedy’s a pretty nobody, perched on the top rung because that’s the way it is. Even Kayla’s mic-drop moment, where she gets her own back, is cleverly fumbled for bathos; it’s satisfying for us merely because we see her so psyched.

As her father does, Burnham holds out hope for Kayla, and chivvies her along by having her shadow Olivia (Emily Robinson), a bright and welcoming high-school senior who acts just as breathlessly from nervous tension as she does, if not rather more so. The terrors of not yet fitting in are put into neat perspective by seeing people four years older who, cool as they may appear, still feel just as clueless.

When Kayla reaches Olivia’s age, eighth grade will be ancient history – and so, in its way, will Eighth Grade, which features the phone-messaging apps specific to 2018, and observes in passing that no one uses Facebook any more. But while Kayla Day is very much a teenager of her precise time and place, her gruelling anxiety – and Fisher’s wonderful yearning in the role – make her universally relatable anyway.