Boarding School (2018)

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) If horror movies have taught me anything, it’s that boarding schools are where terrible things happen and that we should never willingly go to one. Boarding School merely repeats that obvious lesson, albeit with a few extra complications. Our protagonist is a 12-year-old boy who gets sent to boarding school to learn alongside other misfits — and much of the film is waiting out the twists and complications, of which there are many if few do much more than add other dead bodies to the final count. Like a surprising number of recent low-budget horror films, director Boaz Yakin’s Boarding School does look good — and the slow burn of the plot means that the film is far more often effective as a mood piece than an out-and-out horror film. Unfortunately, it also plays with too many ill-fitting pieces to make the result anything but a half-satisfying blend of genre elements. The intention to deliver a sympathetic statement about misfits is blurred by their deaths, and the film is (thankfully) unwilling to commit itself to a classical genre piece. The result is far less interesting than it should have been, but it does distinguish itself from many other duller horror movies. Boarding School probably would have been better with half the ideas and twice the pacing.