Wasted on the Young

(Full disclosure: I am acquainted with director Ben C Lucas)

I saw Wasted on the Young at its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival,and it got a strong reaction from the audience. I'm not sure I can say we enjoyed it, because it is a disturbing film in many ways, but it was certainly a highly impressive debut from a rookie team.

A plot synopsis will make it sound like a generic high school movie; cool kids bullying uncool kids, drug-fuelled parties and so on. Halfway through, though, an event occurs which takes us into altogether darker territory and what the director terms "a moral fable".

Technically, the film has many virtues. The bleached-out cinematography, the strikingly shot swimming pool sequences and the nightmarish music/sound design during the party scenes all serve the story well, and are far more ambitious than most Australian movies.

Wasted on the Young shows high school as a horrifying and hermetically sealed environment (I don't think we see any parents or teachers at all), and a cast headed by the impressive Oliver Ackland really convey the tension and conflict of the story.

Australia has no adults nor authorities. This is a movie that at any time could have a realistic plot with the addition of post-teenage rationalism, but instead we are stuck with hormones and sterile egos.

Is this what happens when there are no adults, no teachers, no authority figures, no police, no post-pubescent neighbors observing the self-servient and egotistical world of over-indulged, extremely privileged teens? This is Lord of the Flies redone with text messages. There is really no creativity here, no reality. The movie pits the brainiacs versus the jocks; the entitled versus the proletariat.

Kudos to the acting skills of several of the members and the film crew did a good job. It's the plot that disappoints. There is no higher meaning, no layers to scrape away and discuss after the credits roll. This movie is obvious, superficial, and without redemption.

Save time and instead of watching this, read something.

WY is a violent, disturbing, low-budget Australian film whose plot and conflict are a bit similar to "Betrayed at 17" but go to lengths far beyond those of the Lifetime B-17. While it focuses mainly on the very darkest aspects of adolescence, it's pretty and sadly moving in a few spots, and the acting/characterization are undeniably real. WY also has a touch of the artsy and the surreal; it does a nice job of meshing certain characters' fantasies with their realities. Another interesting aspect of this film is how, although a few sparse adult voices are heard, the only visible characters are the teenagers, something I haven't seen anywhere outside of "Charlie Brown."

The pace of WY often plods (particularly in the middle), and the scope is limited almost exclusively to the teenagers' school and homes. Those qualities, along with the fact that WY's just generally a real downer, will obviously not appeal to some tastes. Others will find, as I did, that its better, more unique qualities make it a memorable and worthwhile experience.

Wasted on the Young is an intense movie in the vein of Animal Kingdom but with a subject matter most similar to Brick. It is well crafted and the production value seems high for the tight budget they were undoubtedly restricted to.

The film is about a group of young people in an Australian private school whose lives are changed due to a horrific event that takes place at a wild party at the "alpha male" of the school's house. It is a very intense and engaging movie but unfortunately the ending was a bit of a let down and didn't really fit with the rest of the film.

The absence of any adult or authority figures in the movie is telling and the interaction between the perpetrators and victims is at times very disturbing.

It is a very interesting movie and it is a shame the ending wasn't as good as I hoped it would be but it well worth spending the time and money to see this film.

I struggled watching this a couple times because I hated 95% of the main cast who are all more or less genuinely terrible people and this is obvious from the very start.

The movie deals with bullying and peer-pressure and the characters all felt rather real, plenty of similar characters from my old school for instance, and perhaps that is why it was initially hard for me to watch.

I won't spoil it but the script could have been rather memorable if it hadn't ended up taking a safer route in the end where it should have just hit the gas pedals and made more of an impact but instead it ended up taking a bit of a detour.

Visually it's very much on point though, has some gorgeous scenery and the acting is stellar as well, kind of a 'feel bad'-movie though and yeah it didn't deliver enough in the end for me not to feel that there was an opportunity to do something above average, but the director and script-writer missed it, leaving you a bit unsatisfied.