Alexander Justin Gonzales’s "Mean Boys" is a high school movie that pretends to be glossy teen drama but hides something far more unsettling beneath its carefully polished exterior. It opens with Ira Scholsberg, a social outcast whose desire to belong pulls him into the gravitational field of the school’s most powerful clique. On the surface, it’s a familiar story of status, seduction, and survival. But Gonzales isn’t interested in recycling archetypes. He’s after something slipperier—a portrait of youth shaped less by rebellion and more by performance, where even guilt is choreographed.
The film understands that modern high school politics aren’t loud anymore. They’re quiet, deliberate, and built on perception management. Social media lingers like a ghost in every interaction, every pose, every whispered betrayal. Ira’s initiation into this glittering yet venomous circle begins with small manipulations and staged vulnerability, until a single moment—accidental, almost banal—forces them all into a silent pact of complicity. From that point forward, friendship becomes strategy. Love triangles spiral not out of passion but power dynamics. Desire itself is weaponised.
What’s striking is how Mean Boys handles queerness—not as an obstacle to overcome or a flag to wave, but as part of the atmospheric tension. The boys here are openly bisexual, openly experimenting, yet still trapped. Not by the fear of being outed, but by the exhausting need to control how they’re seen. They flirt, they fight, they cover up mistakes with the same calculated charm used to curate their public selves. Gonzales has captured a particular 2025 anxiety: when identity isn’t hidden, it’s managed, filtered, and endlessly re-performed.
Ryan Wayne’s portrayal of Ira is quietly devastating. He’s the still point in a storm of shifting allegiances, a boy whose silence feels as rehearsed as the smiles around him. Jake Hepner’s Duke, by contrast, is fire without containment, threatening to expose what the others desperately keep under wraps. Together with the ensemble, they create a lived-in toxicity—every glance hints at a shared secret, every laugh at a history of betrayal and intimacy left unspoken.
Tonally, the film refuses the obvious. There are no garish montages, no heightened camp theatrics. Murder is not spectacle here but a whisper. The camera lingers on half-lit corridors, uncomfortably long stares, conversations that end before they’ve really begun. It’s as if Gonzales has stripped away the noise to show how cruelty survives best in silence.
By the time the film reaches its chilling final note, Mean Boys has rewritten the teen clique movie for a generation fluent in self-curation and emotional performance. It doesn’t ask whether these boys will survive high school—it asks who will control the narrative of survival. And in a world where visibility offers no safety, that’s far more terrifying than any scream or bloodstain.
7.5/10
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