An version of a YA classic about two rival fairytale schools is too drawn out, uninteresting, and completely lacking of charm.
The School for Good and Evil, a drab fantasy on Netflix, demonstrates that creating a hit comparable to Harry Potter is more difficult than it would seem. JK Rowling has worked hard lately to decrease the public’s opinion of her professional accomplishments.
With a new story about misfit teens being whisked away to a magical cliffside academy strangely attached to its flawed organizational system, novelist Soman Chainani and writer-director Paul Feig—a man trying his damnedest to erase all memory that he once possessed the power to make us laugh—set out to recreate that generational smash. According to the bank records, they succeeded since Chainani’s hexalogy consistently made best-seller lists, made him very wealthy, and received approval for the movie adaptation, which elevates a merely popular book to the status of an official Thing. However, once this story leaves the YA-industrial complex and enters the harsher world of public inspection, a full curriculum’s worth of flaws become apparent to a less amenable audience that yearns for more than stale teen-lit clichés to fill some inner content vacuum.
As the original studio Universal lost interest in the project after putting it on hold for over ten years, Chainani’s prose is free to be its worst self in the standardless streaming wilds. His universe revolves on revisionism, striving to a critical interpretation of well-known fairy tale lore that is more influenced by the brutality and irrationality of Hans Christian Andersen’s narrative than its spotlessly Disneyfied bastardizations. The main notion is on the contradiction that is softly dismantled in the title, allowing us to see that witches were merely confused girl bosses and princes may be entitled jerks thanks to our educated contemporary viewpoint. In the sunshiny building for princes and princesses, everything is all flowers, makeup, and bows, whereas in the permanently fog-coated tower across the street, dark spellcasters and other villains-to-be eat glop between ugliness classes. This Manichean binary takes a stark form at the School for Good and Evil that wears its falseness on its ruffled sleeve.
Best friends Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Agatha Scott) stumble into this digital eyesore, which strangely is a movie preoccupied with shadow and light but lacks a functioning mastery of neither (Sofia Wylie). They are shocked when Sophie is assigned to the Evil school by a big wicker bird and Agatha is sent to the girly-girls of the Good. The former plays the bubbly extrovert to the latter’s goth-lite recluse. They will eventually be able to see through the blatantly artificial divide set up for them, largely thanks to Sophie discovering that you can look good and dress in black, along with time and an overwhelming number of montages featuring Gen Z-approved musicians like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. Along the way, a slew of actors who are much too talented for this stop by to debase themselves. The excellent Rob Delaney and Rachel Bloom each get about 15 seconds of screen time, and the faculty is completed by Kerry Washington, Michelle Yeoh, and Charlize Theron.
One muddled moral inventory sums up Sophie and Agatha’s turbulent first year at college. Instead of claiming the “nice is different from good” insight that Stephen Sondheim did with Into the Woods, it opts for a toned-down version of Shrek’s humorous fable mashup. The obvious repetition of typical Potterisms, such the lakeside training sessions, the elegant dining halls, and the idea that everyone is either a friend, competitor, or crush, serves as the underlying purpose here. A nagging question does arise, however—despite the overt demographic-servicing that makes the writing appear to be fan-fiction—which is, why is this movie under the impression that its leads, an irreplaceable femme-tomboy duo who share a true love kiss right on the mouth in a pivotal scene, are platonic best friends? These characters are denying themselves like it’s 1961 and they need their parents to think they’re roommates while being so heavily queer-coded that it almost reads like text.
Perhaps Feig is within his rights to blatantly set up a sequel with his closing shot given that this structural absence did nothing to alienate the fanbase or block the source material’s journey to franchisehood in the publishing game. The fact that the issue of quality has now been resolved by a predetermined mandate for continuance, however, also raises concerns about the sad reality of the entertainment business. Due to Netflix’s lack of transparency on viewership statistics, they may tell us that 110 billion individuals viewed at least two of the 147 total minutes, and we can decide whether or not to believe them. In any case, it’s difficult to see a real person referencing this movie or even discussing it with another actual person. It gives the sense of being nothing at all because of its attempt to be like other things.
Netflix now has The School for Good and Evil accessible.
Frank DiBernardo handles LNGFRM's Foodie and Miscellaneous writing tasks. He's always getting ideas from users, so don't be afraid to send an email to the editor.
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