We’ve all had at least one memorably intimidating teacher. The one who’s reputation precedes them, who the kids all look at askance and hope to avoid. In my experience, it’s always the science and history teachers. In the world of director Maureen Bharoocha’s THE PRANK, making its world premiere at this year’s SXSW film festival, it’s a truly terrifying physics teacher who’s been terrorizing students with her hard ass ways for forty years. Written by Becca Flinn-White and Zak White, THE PRANK follows Ben (Connor Kalopsis), a perfectionist high school senior on the verge of applying for a scholarship to the school that would allow him to follow in the footsteps of his father. All he needs to finish the application is his midterm grades…but when the menacing Mrs. Wheeler (the incomparable Rita Moreno) discovers someone cheated on the test, she decides to fail everyone until the offender confesses. Angered at this threat to his future, Ben vents to his best friend Tanner (Ramona Young), who soon devises a prank designed to grease the wheels of the high school rumor mill enough to get Mrs. Wheeler fired. When it goes too far and the police and local news cycles get involved, the two try to do damage control, uncovering one of the school’s darkest secrets in the process.
THE PRANK is a fun ride propelled onward by strong performances from every member of the cast and, despite some pacing issues that occasionally slow the story just when it begins to pick up speed, it’s a darkly comic exploration of the time-honored tradition of intimidated kids making monsters out of mole hills—only this time, of course, there may be more truth to the monster. When you place all the value and pressure on students to succeed and get into college, naturally they’ll be terrified by anything they interpret as putting their futures at risk. Mix in a bit of teenage hormonal imbalance destined to impair decision-making and emphasize dramatic emotional response with a teacher whose monstrous reputation makes even the newscasters cheer for her downfall, and you’ve got THE PRANK.
Imagine if this book took place in high school, and you’ve got THE PRANK.
Rita Moreno’s terrifying turn as Mrs. Wheeler gives one of the scariest academic villains in recent memory. Aware—and proud of—her reputation as the school’s most demonically driven teacher, she takes a pride in her work and in her classes the likes of which scares students and faculty alike. Moreno steals every scene she’s in from moment one, and while we never fully take her side, she becomes the character we most love to hate. Menacing even at her most reserved moments, she’s the epitome of the teachers who gave us all anxiety and pressure to succeed unlike anything we’d ever felt. The ones we remember for how hard they pushed, whether for good or ill. Through her pervasive reputation and the lens of future pressures, THE PRANK is a delightfully dark turn in the rumor mills of high school and how reputation and image sometimes supersede truth.
Social media’s double-edged potential seems to be a pervasive theme of this year’s SXSW film festival, and perhaps nowhere is it better served than here. At once critical of both the boomer tendency to believe anything on the internet and the younger generation’s flippant ability to latch onto and release scandal at the expense of their peers with shocking rapidity, the success of the film’s plot spins on both the intricacies of how both elements interact and relies on both sides of the coin to function best. Even when Tanner tries to undo some of the damage created by her fake plant evidence, she acknowledges that it’s already too late to sweep their prank under the rug because “the woman is already a meme”. The more it spins out of control the more Ben and Tanner try to rationalize the increasingly dire stakes away by saying their plants are obviously fake to anyone willing to take even a cursorily deep look at the photos—but when the public has already decided you’re a demon before ever having any evidence, why would they bother to pay attention to details? And when, in our current culture, has the majority ever decided to research the veracity of a statement before promoting it?
Driven by this seed of cultural interrogation, THE PRANK takes the stakes up to eleven in delightfully bombastic ways even as the pacing sometimes slows the narrative. Thanks to the cast’s performances and just enough ridiculous elements to provide levity to what is, at its heart, an incredibly dark tale, it never feels too out of its own depth. THE PRANK knows what it is and what it wants to do and does it well enough to leave you walking away seriously thinking about the ways it criticizes the culture we live in and the pressure we put on high school. What was your high school urban legend?
Tags: Becca Flinn-White, Connor Kalopsis, Film Festivals, Maureen Bharoocha, Ramona Young, Rita Moreno, SXSW, SXSW 2022, The Prank, Zak White
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