OVERVIEW
A Dutch school-revenge comedy where the loser is a forty-year-old music teacher, and the bully is a student who happens to be the principal’s nephew. Edwin (Rutger de Bekker) listens to his only friend, gym teacher Peter (Ruben van der Meer), who tells him to hit back, and Edwin takes this too literally and slaps Bastiaan across the face. Bastiaan filmed it, and now Edwin must do whatever Bastiaan says, or the video will go viral.
BACKGROUND
Playing Fantasia 2026 as a Canadian premiere, After School comes from Merijn Scholte Albers and Tobias Smeets, best known by Dutch teenagers as the duo behind Mastermovies, a video site in the early 2000s, where famous Hollywood scenes were redubbed with crude, deadpan voice-overs. The film expands on their short Schoolfeest and was released in Dutch cinemas but is still without a North American distributor.
THE REVIEW
After School is a fun throwback to the school comedies of the 90s, earning a few solid laughs from its characters and from a situation that keeps getting more ridiculous. For much of the runtime, it is the two teachers against Bastiaan, with the latter making their lives even worse than they already were. The boy is a huge brat. Threatening to leak the video of the slap, Bastiaan politely asks Edwin to tell rude and embarrassing jokes to the whole school. Edwin and Peter answer with an elaborate plan to kidnap Bastiaan’s dog, in a heist sequence that increasingly goes wrong and is the film’s best. Things are never taken too far, and while Bastiaan is appropriately obnoxious, we always see the kid underneath who wants to be connected to somebody.
There are fun supporting characters, the highlight being Sezgin Güleç as Melchior, the helpful and easy-going intern. A subplot with drug dealers turns them into the real threat, and a pair of policemen keep circling as Edwin and Bastiaan’s schemes get bigger.
The jokes keep coming, some of them working far better than the others (the montage of the teachers with the naked body being the absolute worst). Peter does get under the skin, and there is the obligatory conflict with Edwin, which has them broken apart.
FINAL THOUGHTS
After School doesn’t impress in originality, but thankfully keeps the pranks and its story modest, making it a lightweight, breezy school comedy. There are enough laughs and heart to make it worth your time.