‘The Graduates’ Review: A Quietly Somber Portrait of a Community Living Through Grief

To see, as we do in writer-director Hannah Peterson’s debut feature, The Graduates, young adults handing over their backpacks for inspection and flashing ID cards to security personnel as a matter of their morning routine feels uncanny and dystopian, even to those of us who were young at the time of the Jonesboro and Columbine shootings. The film doesn’t exactly encode outrage over political inaction on gun control, but it might well provoke it.

This somber drama about a community reckoning with the violent death of six high-schoolers knows that sometimes words, whether angry or distraught, often aren’t sufficient. It opens with several dialogue-free minutes, with Vicki (Kelly O’Sullivan), a teacher, approaching a memorial to the murdered students in a silent and darkened school hallway, while 12th-grader Genevieve (Mina Sundwall) impassively proceeds through a security checkpoint.

The subdued soundscape persists throughout The Graduates, in interactions broken apart by awkward pauses and downward glances. Genevieve’s boyfriend, Tyler (Daniel Kim), was one of the students killed in the shooting at the school the previous year, and long before the event is explicitly acknowledged, Tyler’s fate becomes evident from Genevieve’s late-night revisiting of old smartphone videos and from the sympathy cards stuck to the refrigerator of John Cho’s sensitive, quietly wounded basketball coach John, who’s revealed to be Tyler’s grieving father.

Genevieve’s impending graduation, which coincides with the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, compels renewed reflection on how she and those around her will manage to move on with their lives. For her part, Genevieve seems reluctant to do so, with both Vicki and her mother, Maggie (Maria Dizzia), gently pushing back on the teen’s plan to take a gap year. And the return of her and Tyler’s buddy Ben (Alex R. Hibbert) to town, after a year processing his trauma elsewhere, also brings her to face the missing parts of her life.

The Graduates anchors itself in Genevieve’s struggle to figure out how to leave this part of her life behind, and Sundwall’s performance is a finely detailed portrait of a shell-shocked teen barely containing the turmoil within. But Peterson also generously divides the story’s attention between the other members of the community and their ways of coping with survivor’s guilt.

No one method is less or more legitimate than the other. Ben, with whom Genevieve shares a cautious, possibly confused flirtation early on, is more forthcoming with his feelings and even continues to leave voicemails for Tyler, rather than bottling things up. John appears to sublimate his grief through the support that he offers others, seeing his son’s teammates and friends through their final year of school with unflaggingly positive, but not exactly energetic, grace. Privately mournful, Vicki puts on an encouraging face for the youngsters she advises.

Peterson sees the ramifications of traumatic loss as varied and unpredictable, from person to person and even from moment to moment. Genevieve, usually stoic if quietly on edge, has a breakdown after a heart-to-heart with Ben, abandoning her bike to sit on the curb and sob, in the film’s most direct and rending depiction of the young woman’s heartache.

But while Peterson, with her emphasis on quiet moments and mementos mori, effectively suffuses The Graduates with a mournful absence of life, she also reminds us of the warmth that can be so typical of high school: the tight bonds between friends, the generous affection between teachers like Vicki and John and their wards. Even the raucous high-school parties continue—it’s just that the interpersonal drama that plays out over plastic Solo cups has much larger stakes than usual. Sadly, The Graduates shows that even while the core of high school experience remains relatively the same, it’s also become a place where security guards pat you down, every bell evokes images of armed invaders, and trauma accompanies students down the hallways.