Boys Will Be Boys in ‘The Line’ [Tribeca 2023 Review]
Several years ago, Super Dark Times chilled in its verisimilitude. An austere portrait of misguided boys and nascent rage, their collective penchant for violence reached its natural conclusion with striking realism. A 90s grunge reinterpretation of Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge, the horror was born of how boys will be boys, of how entitlement and privilege are scarier monsters than any knife-wielding psychopath. Ethan Berger, in his feature narrative debut, strikes the same white, heteronormative chord with The Line, a startling portrait of Greek life whose violent fidelity is more frightening than any of the monsters under the bed at this year’s Tribeca Festival.
Alex Wolff (Hereditary) stars as Tom, a sophomore member of the fictional KNA (Kappa Nu Alpha) fraternity at a fictional Southern college. Tom’s mother (Cheri Oteri) questions the efficacy of Greek life, wondering why Tom is keener to adopt fake “Forrest Gump” accents and talk about girls than he is to mention science or literature. At $30,000 a year, she wished for more.
Tom, on the cusp of immense privilege, is myopic in his perception of the world. There is nothing more. KNA is a gateway to springboard internships dangled like a horse’s carrot by roommate Mitch’s (Bo Mitchell) father, a brief yet chilling John Malkovich. KNA is the opportunity to accompany Todd (Lewis Pullman) to lunch with the dean of students. It’s ragers and girls, inoculation from a world of minorities and those who simply don’t have it.
The cinema verité camerawork captures the organic essence of 2014 (the year The Line is set) bro culture. Berger and co-writer Alex Russek are impartial observers, capturing without editorializing the frequent homophobia and racism the members of KNA spout with abandon. Queerness and Blackness are worthy of ridicule within their hallowed fraternity halls, though both Berger and Russek are smart in how they use language as a throughline to the ever-encroaching muck of insidious ideology that’s slowly consuming them all. In a microcosm of exclusively white men vying for power and esteem, friends become enemies with ease.
Hostile new pledge Gettys (Austin Abrams) conceptualizes the bleak threat to tradition. Yielding no less influence than Mitch and his father’s money, Gettys is the handsome, desirable juxtaposition. Where both embody whiteness and straightness, Gettys has the look to end up on top, repeatedly deflecting Mitch’s homophobic jabs with rejoinders of his own, viciously tearing Mitch down for his weight and perceived lack of game.
Halle Bailey (this year’s The Little Mermaid) briefly appears as an audience surrogate. A potential love interest of Tom’s, Bailey is often constrained by The Line’s weakest modern sensibility. She makes an impression, though too often, her scenes are reduced to wall-breaking quips assuring that, no, the language and behavior of Tom and KNA are not normal.
The Line unfurls with the perceived power struggle, with shifting degrees of influence as Tom, Mitch, Gettys, and Lewis endeavor to isolate the others and use the perceived weight of a collective, symbiotic community to bludgeon enemies into nothingness. Janet Reitman’s chilling 2012 expose of Greek culture at Dartmouth is far from fiction.
To maintain their heightened sense of self-importance, the pledges are subjected to grueling hazing rituals, ranging from the benign (shaving their heads and scrotums) to the sadistic. The most notable is a basement beatdown that evokes the sinister imagery of Abu Ghraib as the pledges are stripped to their underwear with shams over their heads and repeatedly beaten by frat members in a game of beat-em-up trivia.
Daniel Rossen’s score is suitably chilling, and cinematographer Stefan Weinberger captures the remote reality these boys exist within. That The Line culminates in a shocking act of violence terrifies with resigned familiarity. Boys will be boys. And these boys—the ones that abuse, torment, and even kill those in their way—will one day be the leaders of this country. The politicians, the CEOs, and, according to KNA lore, maybe even the President.
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The Line
Summary
The Line is a terrifying debut from director Ethan Berger.
