The primary fuel in the tank of Hannah Peterson’s extremely modest, extremely earnest indie, The Graduates, is Mina Sundwall’s face, which in every scene looks as though you’d just slapped it. Sundwall began acting as a kid, but since I never watched Lost in Space (2018 to 2021), she seemed to be a new quantity, playing, at 22, a high school senior in hyper-suspension, one year after her boyfriend was killed in a school shooting. Every close-up of the actress, all cried out but still on the verge of tears even when she’s smiling, tells the film’s simple, sad story. With her as its focal point, it could’ve been a silent film.
Maybe it should’ve been, because the rest of Peterson’s film, her first feature, struggles to meet Sundwall’s measure of authentic presence. There isn’t much of a story, just the angsty day-to-day, as this small Utah town’s senior class approaches graduation without six of its original members, and particularly, without a certain one, a beloved Asian American basketballer and boyfriend to Gen (Sundwall). There’s a metal-detector bag check at the school’s front door now, and the teachers all speak in bruised, consoling tones. The halls are often empty; on the weekends, parties are attended but then left in a teary jag. Gen has a particularly empathic bond with the school’s basketball coach (John Cho), because he was her boyfriend’s father. The attempt to pretend everything is normal is disrupted, at least for Gen, by the reappearance of Ben (Alex R. Hibbert, the little kid in Moonlight), who had left town abruptly after the massacre. He pops up after having dropped out of his new school and wanders the streets, dueling his grief with Gen’s, as everyone else prepares to put high school behind them.
The movie blooms a bit in the last act — as though it, like the characters, needed to pass through a few awkward stages of mourning before coming to a wiser, less self-pitying space.
Peterson conscientiously elides almost all mention of the shooting, and no one ever talks about the perpetrator or his (her?) family. Since most of the dialogue for the film’s first hour is dictated by all manner of avoidance, you end up wondering about that family, and the darker parts of the town that no one, including Peterson, wants to probe. There might be a shadow film hiding inside the sniffly one we get to see.
In the meantime, this is literally the type of movie that echoes so many publicists’ plot synopses — the kind that turn on characters “coming to terms” with grief and trauma. The comforting emotional arc leans on signs of healing; Peterson tries for moments of barbed pain, but they feel small and obligatory, setting us up to feel assuaged later. Too many of the teenage scenes have an after-school-special edge to them (“Milkshakes on me!” someone says early on, in a diner), and not enough of the action moves beyond rote strokes of grief expression (fondling old photos and jewelry, brooding alone in church, crying at the gravesite, etc.). What else can be done, if this is your subject?
But then the movie blooms a bit in the last act — as though it, like the characters, needed to pass through a few awkward stages of mourning before coming to a wiser, less self-pitying space. Family therapy finally begins (Maria Dizzia is aptly grave as Gen’s mom), basketball games are played, and classes continue (but would a Utah high school teacher really be lecturing about French philosopher Henri Bergson’s image theory?). And so, a sense of the community wanting to glue itself together emerges — a feeling that doesn’t seem to need the plot force of tragic violence to compel it. What if Peterson had made that movie, the movie about the small town and its uncertain near-adults and the grownups who can’t really help them, without resorting to a bloody backstory that she largely avoids? If Sundwall were in it, I’d be there. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.