F-CKUPS ANONYMOUS | Omeleto

A teenager attends boarding school. Joe is a rebellious teenager who has arrived at a therapeutic boarding school in upstate New York, having been sent there for drinking, fighting with his parents at home and other difficult patterns of behavior. Now he's been sent away and is having his first meal with the school. He's asked to introduce himself to the other students and faculty, and he's skeptical, lackadaisical and even hostile in attitude about his new situation. But Joe's arrival is not the main event of the meal. Instead, the meal is an opportunity for the community to talk publicly, and a student named Lauren is called up to the front by another student named Jessica. What happens is eye-opening -- and makes the consequences of his action and attitude frighteningly clear. Directed by Katrina Whalen and written by Joe Tierney, this gripping short drama is based on the writer's real-life experiences, and it achieves its considerable compelling power through its unmistakable authenticity, its almost forensic attention to psychological detail and its nervy, unerring performances. These facilities are often the last port of call for parents desperate to deal with their "out of control" teenagers. But their methods are revealed to be intensely manipulative and mentally cruel, raising questions about whether they're helpful or harmful in the long run. Outside of a few flashes of Joe's past life of freedom and rebellion, shot with the storytelling's characteristic moody naturalism and careful eye for detail, most of the action is confined to the school's lunch room, where Joe is introduced as the new student and given a welcome that is warm on the surface but steely in subtext. Through his situation, Joe is the lens through which we view the unraveling of Lauren, which reveals the methods and ethos of the school. The film's writing shines with its emotional intricacy, capturing not just Lauren's vulnerable yet defiant character, but the alarming psychological gambits used to humiliate and shame her into submission. The cast is uniformly excellent, with each performer delivering a highly specific and vivid character in a short amount of time. But actors Andrew Michael Fama and Sarah Jeffery as Joe and Lauren, respectively, stand out in their responsiveness, precision and rawness. As characters, they haven't yet "bought into" the boarding school's browbeating and judgment of them -- Joe mostly because he has no idea yet what he's going to do, and Lauren because she doesn't see herself the way the other students and teachers do. But as the school authorities publicly shame and expose her most private thoughts, Lauren is broken down -- and Joe is left wondering just what is in store for him in the near future. Well-crafted, emotionally unvarnished and unafraid of discomfort, F-CKUPS ANONYMOUS is a gut punch to the heart, leaving viewers anxious for Joe and confronted with questions. The residential therapeutic program is a fascinating storytelling milieu, but the film -- which is a proof-of-concept for a larger serial narrative -- is all the more horrifying, based as it is on personal experience. Such a hothouse of psychological intensity forces us to see how public humiliation and shaming can coerce teens into compliance, but it also asks what long-term damage may be done to the psyches and souls of the young people involved. F-CKUPS ANONYMOUS. Courtesy of Katrina Whalen at https://instagram.com/fckupsanonymous.