Film: The Dirties
Director: Matt Johnson
Starring: Matt Johnson, Owen Williams

It’s curious how, in the rush to blame violent outbursts by youths on video games and heavy music, people rarely pause to consider the impact a hostile schooling environment can have on a teenage psyche. Society is so quick to condemn pop culture for twisting an allegedly fragile mind into something monstrous that it never seems to see how easily a youth could be corrupted by the simple malice of his or her peers. Bullying has been endemic in schools for decades, taking on particularly nasty and pernicious forms since the advent of the internet, but many have yet to acknowledge the debilitating and often lingering consequences of being shunned, mocked, or at worse physically assaulted by fellow youths. Anyone who has been a victim of bullying can attest to the guilt, shame, pain, and fear it instils and the constant battle to restore a sense of self-worth and dignity. The Dirties is an intense, involving, and ultimately disturbing look at the impact of persistent violent bullying on two teenagers, and how it drives one of them to make a particularly chilling decision.

Matt and Owen (director Matthew Johnson and Owen Williams, respectively) are two high school friends who are constantly picked on by a number of their peers. After being given a film project for a class, they devise an elaborate plan to get back at ‘The Dirties’ and decide to make it the focus of their project. However, as they get further into filming, the line between fiction and reality begins to blur for one of the boys.

Filmed in a low-key, deliberately amateurish manner, The Dirties intersperses outtakes of Matt and Owen working on their film with vignettes they’ve shot for the project.  The washed out, roughly-hewn visuals and shaky camera are recognisable from iPhone videos everywhere, painting a startlingly realistic portrait of a mundane high school and its inhabitants. The scenes of the two hanging out and working on their film could be drawn from any youtube upload – light-hearted and relateable, they spend most of their time joking, discussing movies, and laying out a strategy for Owen to approach the object of his affections. It’s such an immediately familiar world that the periodic beatings and humiliation the two are forced to endure become all the more shocking. The camera takes to cowering behind fellow students and desks, concealing itself from the violence while capturing it all on film. It seems to reflect the simultaneous disbelief and revulsion of the audience, as no matter how much one sees this level of animosity played out onscreen it’s still hard to imagine that someone could hate and harm someone else so irrationally. At one key point in the film, Matt recalls the first time he was picked on “just for being himself”, underlining the most devastating aspect of bullying – the manner in which it dehumanises the victim. Bullying is as much about power and control as it is breaking down the victim, but the loss of self-worth is perhaps its most damning effect. When people are harassed for no apparent reason other than their being, it feeds into a kind of shame and resentment of oneself and a twisted belief that you are in some way responsible for what happens to you. We can see this effect taking increasing hold in Matt throughout the film, as he begins to distance himself more and more from reality and uses the film project, and his alter-ego therein, as a means of coping with the harassment and playing out revenge fantasies. When this builds to its inevitable grisly conclusion, it’s all the more affecting for the manner in which we have been drawn into the boys’ world and witnessed the escalating effects of their classmates’ actions.

Both Johnson – who also co-wrote the screenplay – and Williams are terrific, the former particularly effective in conveying the gradual breakdown of his character’s psyche. It’s a testament to his portrayal that although the ending is foreshadowed more or less from the off, it remains utterly chilling when it finally transpires. In many instances of violent crime, one of the most difficult things for people to accept is that the perpetrator lived among them, never showing any outward signs of what was coming. Many like to think that violent criminals are easily spotted, exuding some unequivocal air of malice or danger that posits them as someone to watch out for. The reality – as evidenced by the film’s final, disturbing words – is that in many cases those who commit horrible crimes are not some particular brand of other but us, plainly us, and that in different circumstances we might have ended up where they have. The stark depiction of this very intimate horror is precisely why The Dirties is so essential a film, and so powerful a statement.

SCORE: A

Review written by Grace Duffy

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