In Honor Society (Paramount+), a calculating overachiever’s plans to maneuver her college competition off the game board of senior year in a small town spin in unintended and downright funny directions. A delightful Angourie Rice leads a young cast that includes Gaten Matarazzo, aka Dustin from Stranger Things.
The Gist: For Honor Rose (Angourie Rice), high school is just a calculation. She’s the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, captain of the volleyball team, coordinator of the campus food bank, and founder of the karate club – “while never letting my grades suffer,” she tells us in one of her many instances of breaking the fourth wall – but Honor does all of it just to keep up appearances. What she’s really after is what comes after, and that’s college. Harvard, specifically, alma mater of her hero Margaret Atwood. Because unlike Offred from The Handmaid’s Tale, Honor has control of her fate. And she’s determined to get out of her nowhere town for good.
Honor has calculated that there’s value in enduring the creepy vibes of guidance counselor Mr. Calvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) because of his connections with Harvard admissions. But when he tells her she isn’t his first choice but one of a group, Honor also calculates that she’ll have to destroy her competition. She engages her best friends and stereotypical mean girls twosome Talia and Emma, played with cartoonish flair by Kelcey Mawema and Avery Konrad, as foot soldiers in her war of manipulation against three A students: lacrosse captain Travis (Armani Jackson), bookish outlier Kennedy (Amy Keum), and quiet nerd Michael (Gaten Matarazzo).
The battle plan? Sabotage her competition’s energy and time commitments. Noting Travis’s surreptitious interest in Gary (Ben Jackson Walker), she inserts herself into his theater club and nominates Travis for the lead role of the play Kennedy wrote, a play that never would have seen the stage were it not for Honor’s subtle nudges. With two of her targets increasingly preoccupied, she turns to Michael, who proves harder to play. Yes, he’s a nerd. Yes, he’s bullied. But there’s something ticking behind the scenes, and as Honor draws him closer, timing her kill shot, she’s surprised to find herself increasingly intrigued. All of her schemes have been enacted with her signature cold-blooded calculation. But the side effects – Travis coming to terms with his identity, Kennedy’s voice and empowerment, and Michael’s stirring something within her – have become more powerful than she ever imagined. This is bigger than Honor juking her competition and getting into Harvard. It’s about everyone quitting it with all of the hiding. But anything that big might have made some darker calculations of its own.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Honor’s machinations put her in the company of Cher from Clueless, and Honor Society also aligns well with sharply-rendered recent high school comedies like Edge of Seventeen and Booksmart.
Performance Worth Watching: Ben Jackson Walker makes a splash here as Gary, the theater club ringleader who shoulders the outsized musical theater portion of Kennedy’s play with swagger and ultimately gets his man.
Memorable Dialogue: Honor’s killer instinct is engaged and she has eyes on her targets. “I didn’t want him to tell me who the competition was for two reasons. One, I don’t need him to. In this school of underachieving losers, there’s only three people it could be. And two, when I leave them on the side of the road, I don’t want him to suspect I had anything to do with it.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: “You can’t spell sympathetic without pathetic.” A character with a professed disregard for pretty much everyone around her is difficult to make compelling, or likable at the very least. But Angourie Rice – who as Betty Brant steals at least one scene in every Spider-Man film she makes – makes Honor so bright and engaging that it’s almost shocking whenever she reveals her shallowness and lack of scruples. And Rice has a game partner in Gaten Matarazzo. In a series of scenes that are superficially study dates, the two bend their lines to the will of each character’s agenda, agendas that invariably converge as their true selves are revealed. And Stranger Things heads should enjoy seeing Matarazzo twist Dustin Henderson’s sweetness into a barbed new shape.
Honor Society benefits too from its zippy pace. Crisp direction from Oran Zegman and a sharp script from writer David A. Goodman keeps Honor’s frequent forays into fourth wall breakage blended easily into the action, which also includes the occasional still frame for emphasis and funny asides that highlight the foibles of the film’s adult characters. Like so many high school comedies, parents and teachers are stuck on a side road here, running in parallel to the highway the teens are driving on. This is only emphasized further by a musical theater finale complete with costumes, lighting, and staging that rivals the grandiosity of Lexi’s play on Euphoria. Honor Society exists on its own stage, and it’s Honor herself giving us all of this world’s tea.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Led by a captivating performance from Angourie Rice, Honor Society manages equally its own brand of sweetness and darkness while ably accessing the high school comedy formula.
Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges
