Class Dismissed
SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER I Teen boys face the apocalypse in a blackly comic Brit thriller.
Back in July 2019, when Teasers visited the set of School’s Out Forever, times were simpler. Though always a film in which a viral superflu wipes out 93 per cent of the population, this was a fiction that Teasers could place firmly in the realm of fantasy. Ten months and counting into life during the Covid pandemic and School’s Out Forever hits in harder and more unexpected ways than ever intended.
“There’s been something quite macabre about it, the coincidence of it,” says writer-director Oliver Milburn. Lest anyone think this is a bad taste cash-in on a global crisis, not only is the book it’s based on eight years old, but so, too, is Milburn’s script, which spent almost a decade in development. “It’s a weird mix of excitement and fear. Obviously not excitement about the pandemic, but that we might have hit on something.”
On set at London’s Eltham College – doubling today for fictional private school St. Marks – Teasers is witnessing the calm before the storm. Sitting in the office of Anthony Head’s scornful headmaster, scholarship student Lee Keegan (Oscar Kennedy) faces expulsion when cannabis is found in his backpack. But the meltdown from his father doesn’t materialise on the drive home. Instead, he’s distracted by crowds at petrol stations, the rush at supermarkets and headlines about closed borders…
“The film is definitely a worst-case scenario,” Milburn chuckles. “People have done very well, by and large, in the real-life scenario. My pessimism meant that in the film, they didn’t!” As society collapses into chaos and violence, Lee returns to the last sanctuary – St. Marks – where teachers and students have swapped algebra lessons for firearms training. Think Lord Of The Flies meets The Walking Dead, minus the zombies.
“The film juggles dark humour and serious subject matter, because that’s how I am as a person,” says Milburn, whose “North Star” for judging the film’s tone was RoboCop’s horrifying and hilarious boardroom scene. “If the film had taken itself too seriously, then the kids running around with guns would be offensive, really. It would be using that for thrills, in a sort of voyeuristic way, without seeing the satirical side of it.”
Made for just £1 million, School’s Out Forever is the first release from UKbased Rebellion Film Studios, who also have Judge Dredd TV series Mega-City One, and Duncan Jones’ Rogue Trooper in development. “I felt the pressure of being the first film out of the gate for this studio, and wanting to provide them with something that felt like a movie with a real budget,” Milburn chuckles. “So it was written within an inch of its life of what you can achieve on that money, while still keeping it feeling like a real, heavyweight thing.”
ETA | 15 FEBRUARY / SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER IS OUT ON VOD, DVD & BLU-RAY NEXT MONTH.