Depending on where you are, COVID-19 has been with us for about a year and a half now. Through lockdowns, ever-changing guidelines, and a news cycle that rarely isn’t depressing, we’ve gotten plenty of creative writing fuel. While some of us are sick of hearing about sickness, plenty of others channel the pandemic experience into stories that address it head-on.

Technically, School’s Out Forever is not a product of that, with the film based on a book by Scott K. Andrews, School’s Out (Afterblight #3), published in 2007. The timing, however, is ironic, to say the least.

As the film begins, it gives no indication of the sort of film it’s going to be, with buddies Lee (Oscar Kennedy) and Sean (Liam Lau Fernandez) staging a prank that gets Lee kicked out of St. Mark’s School for Boys, a cushy prep school he’d only been able to attend thanks to a scholarship. As Lee’s dad (Steve Oram) drives them home, the looming pandemic is hinted at via the radio, but it’s overshadowed by the tension as Lee grapples with whether or not to be honest about why he was sent home, clearly wanting to tell the truth, but not wanting to disappoint his already beleaguered dad. When a call from his mom, who is stationed abroad for the time being, warns him that the pandemic is rapidly worsening and that, while her genetics make Lee immune, his dad will die if he gets sick, the tone darkens quickly. A couple of scenes later, Lee is in tears as he attempts, by himself, to bury his now-deceased father in the backyard. It’s a somber scene, especially when we see that Lee never did fess up about getting kicked out of school and now he regrets it. The scenes that drive home just how young the protagonists are are the best in the movie; they’re not just tense, they’re heartbreaking.

Lee returns to St. Mark’s at his mom’s behest, where he finds a ragtag group of survivors, including Sean. The few adults who are left watching over the school intend to hunker down and try to get by until they can find out who is left, but when they run afoul of a paramilitary faction of survivors from the parish, war becomes imminent and Sean takes the lead, forcing Lee to make increasingly tough choices that put their friendship to the test.

School’s Out Forever is a grim, intense combination of coming-of-age and outbreak movies. It’s a high-stakes drama more than anything else, and it doesn’t always balance its humor as well with that as similar movies like Anna and the Apocalypse do, but it’s still a decent watch, with a hopeful ending that doesn’t feel out of place.

MOVIE RATING 7 out of 10