2:37 – 2006

The film begins with what happens on a normal school day at 2:37 PM. Someone bleeds to death in the school bathroom, but we don’t find out who. The clock is turned back and we continue to follow six of the school’s students more closely, all with their own problems, during this particular day until the fateful time when one of them has decided not to live anymore. Little by little, secrets are revealed, such as an unwelcome pregnancy where even more incredibly dark secrets lie buried, eating disorders, the fact that the school’s football star is not really who he claims to be, drug abuse and performance anxiety. Secrets that no one could suspect, not even the closest friends, or family, are revealed and step by step we get closer to the terrible truth about who can no longer bear to live and why.

When I first started to watch 2:37, I had just read something about an 11-year age limit, which made me initially a bit skeptical about whether I should really take the time to watch it. Not because films with this age limit usually have to be bad in any way, but rather because the type of film the plot insinuated could hardly be done full justice with that type of categorization. Many times during the film, my eyebrows were also raised by the fact that it actually contained both incestuous rape and really explicit and intimate problematizations that an 11-year-old would probably have difficulty analyzing.

I am not even sure that a 37-year-old, like me*, would always draw the right conclusions from the film, and if you were also a parent of a teenager, the film would be a real pain in the ass! Fortunately, I later found information about a 15-year age limit, which eased my heart at least a little bit. In addition to the fact that it deals with very sensitive and personal topics, the storytelling technique itself is very interesting. Sometimes the more conventional story is mixed with a kind of interviews that both deepen and present characters. We find out a bit of their thoughts in a different way than if they had chosen to only portray them in a traditional way.

I think it is a stroke of genius and they have also taken the time to tell the story from different angles on several occasions. The different characters’ contact with each other is repeated in this way without it becoming boring when we see the same event from a different perspective and with a different background story. Without the comparison being that exact or even particularly appropriate, one could mention the TV series Lost in the context and then I am only thinking of how the different characters interact with each other.

So if you want to see a strong film that really affects you and that hopefully makes you think once or twice about life, you should definitely see this one. It held me in an iron grip from which I felt unable to escape, and it is certainly nice when you benefit from the film a long time after you have finished watching it. Of course, you are also driven by curiosity, after all, you want to know how things are going and which problems are so serious that you can no longer bear to live with them. So look around in your life, maybe there is someone close to you who is feeling unwell. Take advantage of every opportunity to help and support your neighbor, tomorrow may be too late…