Antonio Campos’s debut feature Afterschool was one of my
favorite films of 2008, so I had very high hopes for his follow-up Simon
Killer. And while the style is still distinctly his, the new film
plays in part like the opposite of the earlier. Whereas Afterschool was heavily
structured, with a downright intricate script, Simon seems deliberately
disjointed, almost improvised. Whereas Afterschool’s central character was
almost catatonically passive, Simon’s protagonist is intensely there, alive
and fierce in his tightly-wound little way. And while actors seemed almost like
an afterthought in Afterschool (the camera so often wanted to turn away from
them), Simon practically hinges on the grand gestures of performance.
It may not be as successful as Afterschool, but it feels rawer, more personal –
a quality enhanced by its curiously unformed nature.
