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The kids have never been less all right than they are “3 Weeks After,” a nightmarishly intense depiction of high school bullying and its consequences from Serbian director Miroslav Terzić that offers not a scrap of sentimental
faith in future generations. Following an ill-advised — and very ill-supervised — class tour to the Balkans in the immediate wake of a tragedy that has left the school’s student body even more restive and less disciplined than usual, Terzić’s third feature works up an extraordinary degree of tension around the relentless targeting of one outcast child, culminating in acts of youth-on-youth violence that merit the strongest of trigger warnings whether or not they’re directly depicted on screen. The predatory precision of Damjan Radovanović’s camerawork alone is enough to knot the stomach; startling sound design amps up the horror even when our eyes are spared.
As a portrait of adolescent cruelty at its most extreme and unnerving, “3 Weeks After” stands comparison with Michel Franco’s 2012 breakout feature “After Lucia,” which likewise deployed Haneke-style observational tactics that may divide opinion as to the line between candid, unfiltered realism and exploitation. Realism, however, isn’t the objective in a finale that turns the tables without pursuing anything like catharsis, and doesn’t ring quite as true as everything that precedes it. But this is a challenging, high-wire arthouse provocation, achieved with immense and auspicious formal skill and consideration — perhaps the most purely cinematic statement of intent in this year’s Karlovy Vary competition.
It begins cryptically, with a still, coolly distant shot of a Belgrade tenement block where, several floors up, one unit is ablaze — flames roaring out the window with a fury unbefitting of this calm weekday afternoon. There is no crowd gathered to gawk, no emergency services yet on the scene; just one teenage boy stopping to stare passively at the moderately towering inferno, before resuming his stroll in the opposite direction. Fair warning: This isn’t the last time in the film that someone will turn a blind eye to an escalating catastrophe right in front of them.
The boy is Tsotsa (Jovan Ginić), a wary, introverted type whom we gradually learn is traumatized by the recent suicide of his best friend Andrija — a vulnerable lad who was mercilessly bullied by alpha jock Miloš (Andrija Marković) and his cohorts, who show little remorse over any role they may have played in his death. Instead, they’ve just shifted all their violent taunting to Tsotsa, who has a vague ally in queer female classmate Daria (Andjela Alavirević), but is otherwise a lone target when the class boards a bus headed for Bulgaria, where teachers Viktorija (Tihana Lazović) and Markuš (Branislav Trifunović) are chaperoning an educational tour. It’s been just three weeks since Andrija died; privately, the teachers wonder if this is a good idea.
Spoiler alert: It’s not. Though there’s little room for maneuver in the bus, Radovanović’s eerily floating camera captures an immediate sense of unease in languid tracking shots down the center aisle, where the social hierarchy soon becomes clear: Cool kids toward the back, misfits toward the front, with the teachers scarcely able to make themselves heard above the former group’s rowdy antics, much less impose any kind of order on proceedings. Paolo Segat’s remarkable sound design builds layers of shrieking cacophony in this tinny, claustrophobic space; in shots outside the bus, however, the minimalist static glitching of Sonja Lončar and Andrija Pavlović’s electronic score takes over, quieter if no less menacing.
The teasing and needling of Tsotsa starts early, extending to physical conflict when the bus breaks down and the group is forced to stay overnight at an empty off-season resort in Bulgaria’s remote woodlands. As the frazzled teachers eventually give up on any semblance of authority, an atmosphere of feral, out-for-blood disorder takes over in this Overlook-style liminal space, and Tsotsa — played by Ginić with a fine balance of effortful stoicism and inwardly jittery terror — is stripped of all protections, building to a heart-in-mouth game of cat-and-mouse. As horrifying as the perpetrators’ abuse is, however, the indifference of other students strikes an equal chill: One unforgettable shot drifts steadily from a brutal playground beating to the passive complicity of one bully’s girlfriend on the sidelines, scrolling through her phone and casting occasional, tetchy glances at the brawl.
“3 Weeks After” itself offers little commentary on such behavior besides identifying it so vividly; Tsotsa retaliates, but ambiguously so, in a semi-surreal sequence so divorced from the film’s hitherto visceral realism that it may well be a dream. Terzić’s film ends with slightly less jolting impact than it begins, but it’s a ferociously impressive immersion into the most animalistic extremes of human behavior, realized with an unblinking gaze and an uncannily steady hand, and permitting very little hope by the end of it all. It believes the children are the future. Be afraid.
