suicide

I probably watch this a little more than once a decade, often enough to see the clothes date further each time while the motivations don’t really move at all. JD would be on Twitter now, and he’d be annoyingly good at it. Winona looks superb and plays Veronica with more precision than the part needs. Slater’s Jack Nicholson impression is fine once you accept it for what it is. The satire only works because it’s brutal. Its target isn’t school so much as everything school is a rehearsal for. The lines survive brilliantly: “my teenage angst has a body count.”

One oddity. In the final act, I’ve always noticed that a part of David Newman’s score sounds lifted from Super Metroid, released six years later. Still no idea what to do with that.

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.

Watched on Tuesday March 17, 2026.