School of Misfits: "Boarding School" a defiantly unusual but always interesting hodgepodge

Boarding School (2018) 

101 min., rated R. 

Always one to bounce around genres, writer-director Boaz Yakin—he of 2000’s sports crowd-pleaser “Remember the Titans,” 2003’s Brittany Murphy-Dakota Fanning dramedy “Uptown Girls,” and 2015’s military search dog adventure “Max”—dips into strange, lurid territory with passion project “Boarding School.” The film is overwrought but oddly likable, daring to be a little different as a dark fairy tale that combines gender identity, a Holocaust survivor’s story, sinister happenings at a private school, and bloody violence. While not every ingredient works in tandem, as Yakin tries walking a tonally wonky tightrope, “Boarding School” is very much a curiosity piece if there ever was one.

Living in a New York apartment in the 1990s, bullied Jewish 12-year-old Jacob (Luke Prael) keeps having nightmares about his Holocaust-surviving grandmother whom he’s never met. His mother, Isabel (Samantha Mathis), can’t take it anymore, while his stepfather, Davis (David Aaron Baker), is a little more supportive. The next morning, Jacob receives the news that his grandmother has passed away and attends the funeral. Left home alone with boxes of his grandmother’s belongings, Jacob tries on her dress and long evening gloves and then begins tangoing to an old record just as Davis walks in on him. At that point, Jacob is sent away to a boarding school for unique young people run by headmaster Dr. Sherman (Will Patton) and his wife (Tammy Blanchard) and finds six other misfits as his classmates—among them, facially deformed Phil (Nadia Alexander), Jacob’s roommate; mentally handicapped Elwood (Nicholas J. Oliveri); twins Lenny and Calvin (Kobi George, Kadin George); Tourette syndrome-diagnosed Frederic (Christopher Dylan White); and death-obsessed Christine (Sterling Jerins), the daughter of Jacob’s stepfather’s business senior partner. When there’s an alleged suicide, Jacob believes there is something afoot in the place of learning that feels more like a prison.

“Boarding School” sets up the viewer for a supernatural tale with vampiric leanings, only to make an unexpected shift into a form of bait-and-switch storytelling. The film is thematically provocative, but mostly skims the surface when it comes to paralleling Jacob’s transvestism with his grandmother, who survived a Nazi soldier by sharpening her teeth with a nail filer. As a snake-pit horror film, it’s more conventional but still compellingly eccentric before the whodunit portion of the film becomes more of a disturbing whydunit. Luke Prael (2018’s “Eighth Grade”), looking like a younger Ezra Miller, is as sullen as Jacob is called to be, but he is such a fascinating find, not always nailing a Brooklyn accent but certainly selling his character’s tracking arc and ultimate transformation that brings him closer to his late grandmother. Will Patton (2017's "Megan Leavey") exudes an unscrupulous presence right from the start, but he’s still effective as Dr. Sherman, while Tammy Blanchard (2016’s “The Invitation”), as initially trustworthy but strict schoolmarm Mrs. Sherman, more gradually makes the switch to someone who shouldn’t be looking after children. Sterling Jerins (2016’s “The Conjuring 2") is frighteningly precocious as the morbid, possibly sociopathic Christine, and in a gender-bending bit of casting, Nadia Alexander (2018’s “Blame”) is quite touching as Phil, whose burns have branded him a freak in others’ eyes. “Boarding School” might not have a firm hand on its identity at all times, much like its protagonist, but it’s always interesting as a defiantly unusual hodgepodge that refuses to be tied down to one classification of genre.

Grade: B -