Boaz Yakin’s 2017 movie, Boarding School, relates the story of Jacob (Luke Prael), a distressed young boy of Jewish descent who becomes fascinated with his dead grandmother’s persona and is sent to a secluded boarding school for misfits. Initially, the film appears to be a Coming-of-Age psychodrama, but it shapes into something completely distinct once the story starts developing.
Although the acting is not remarkable, seemingly almost forced at times, and one can become bewildered by the plot’s weirdness, the story nevertheless manages to engage. As if in a lunatic dream, a bizarre puzzle of the film’s characters’ peculiar traits is revealed with each successive scene. This doesn’t always work to the audience’s advantage, as one of the film’s protagonists states, “The less you know, the better.”
The atmosphere is purposefully gloomy, the score typical for a horror flick. Rather, sooner than later, one realizes that the Coming-of-Age film Boarding School has somehow turned into a slasher film. A movie complete with jump-scares, violence and even a heroine-like figure, as the young boy, runs around in a dress for most of the film’s duration.
Luke Prael as Jacob in Boarding School
Suppose this was done to portray ambiguous gender identity (like in Rebekah Fortune‘s Just Charlie or Anne Fontaine‘s 2017 drama Reinventing Marvin, the plot might have made a bit of sense. Instead, we have almost supernatural origins that motivate the film’s protagonist and tying into a poorly integrated subplot about the Holocaust.
Boarding School Official Trailer
The plot might be twisted, the scenes disturbing, and yet, at no time does the viewer identify with or even care about any of the film’s characters. That’s an unforgivable sin in a film with a young central lead and with a narrative that at least partly belongs to the Coming-of-Age genre. One gets nothing out of the film and is likely to forget it as soon as the final credits roll (which takes a while as Boarding School’s run time is just short of two hours.
Coming-of-Age horror films are quite rare, but even this fact does not really justify the loss of one’s time caused by watching Boarding School. If you are determined to watch a horror flick with rite-of-passage overtones, you would be better off picking another – such as any of the ones included in our Top 10 Kids of Horror article.
[imdb]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6224502/reference[/imdb]
The Misfits
The 1995 American film Just Like Dad does not shine with an original or poignant storyline, yet its easy going family-friendly nature turns it into a perfect choice for a laid back Sunday afternoon. Made for TV and directed by Blair Treu, the movie tells the story of twelve year old Charlie (Ben Diskin).
Ricardo Trogi‘s The Year I Became a Liar is a delightful autobiographical Coming-of-Age movie narrated in the first person by its protagonist: 11-year-old Ricardo Trogi (Jean-Carl Boucher). The grown-up Ricardo recalls the story of his childhood utilizing a voice-over narration resembling that of the best Coming-of-Age film of 2015, 
The gun-control debate is an ongoing issue in the US, which is why it does not come as a surprise when filmmakers decide to point their lens at it. One such example is Vincent Crashaw’s 2007 film, And Then I Go. Adapted from Jim Sheppard’s novel Project X, the film tells a story of teenage anguish, confusion, aspirations, failures, and ultimately loss of innocence, resulting in a contemporary and compelling Coming-of-Age drama.
The best scenes in the 2015 Dutch film Little Gangster (Original title: De Boskampi’s) are at the beginning and the end. They contain vibrant images, a wild musical score and funny original editing — enough to convince the viewer that an original twist of the all too familiar anti-bullying theme will make the film truly enjoyable to watch.
If you are looking for an entertaining comedy with strong Coming-of-Age motifs, the Norwegian Markus and Diana (original title: Markus og Diana) is an excellent option.
Twelve-year-old Jonathan Grisby is in a big trouble. Sentenced for a horrid crime, he is on his way to a reformatory school. And not just an ordinary one, but an ancient crumbling dark and foul place — an old crumbling fortress located on an isolated island. The school for young boys (or perhaps better said: “prison”) is run by an evil man who calls himself “The Admiral” and, together with his equally crooked staff, abuses his youthful charges on a daily basis with the excuse that he’s trying to reform them for the better and save their souls from evil. When a freak accident takes the lives of all the adult staff, the boys find themselves alone on the island. Yet their newfound freedom brings unexpected danger.
We have all asked ourselves who the superheroes are in this world. A plausible answer is to be found in Mathieu Lalande‘s 2012 short film: Who Are The Superheroes?