‘The Line’ Review: Alex Wolff and Halle Bailey Star in a Compellingly Sinister Campus Thriller
It’s hard not to think about Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History while watching Ethan Berger’s feature debut, The Line. Richard Papen, the protagonist of Tartt’s crisp and propulsive novel, bears quite the resemblance to Tom (Alex Wolff), the main character of Berger’s compelling thriller. Like Richard, Tom is a scholarship student who finds himself cavorting with an elite segment of campus. The classic majors’ cabal, organized around the worship of a mysterious professor, is what pulled Richard in; Greek life, with its allure of fraternal fidelity and alumni access, is what bewitches Tom. Both characters are ashamed of their working-class roots and, in a futile attempt to fit in, mask and mock their pasts.
The Line follows Tom as he learns the same devastating lessons Richard did. Berger, who cowrote the screenplay with Alex Russek, telegraphs the tragedy early, which means we don’t need to piece together a mystery. Instead, we can closely observe the behaviors of the young men of KNA, the fictitious fraternity at the center of the drama. Many of them are scions of American nobility. Their parents are popular politicians and well-connected businessmen whose influence permeates campus life. These boys — and really, they are boys when you think about it — enter collegiate life armed with the security afforded by this legacy. So what exactly are they trying to prove?
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As with most films about the perils of Greek life, the answers are rooted in misogyny. The insular KNA community nurtures an unhealthy appetite for belonging and a desperate need for approval. The Line opens in 2014 with Tom’s mother (Cheri Oteri) calling him out for his posturing. A “faux Forest Gump” accent, nonstop talk of his fraternity’s presidential alumni and creeping entitlement have made him a worse breakfast companion; they are signs of Tom’s slow transformation. Later, at dinner with his friend Mitch (Bo Mitchell) and Mitch’s parents, Tom dons his fake Southern accent and lies about where he worked over the summer.
The Line’s interests — the pressure of Greek life, the toxicity of hypermasculinity, the corrosiveness of white privilege — play out in the interactions between Tom and his family, his friends and, later, his crush, Annabelle (an underused Halle Bailey). Wolff (Hereditary) impresses, deftly modulating his performance so we can’t land too easily in one emotional camp — excessive sympathy or complete ire. Tom wants to fit in, to overcome his class anxieties by transcending them, and KNA offers, at first, the easiest route.
As a sophomore, Tom is now on the other side of hazing rituals. A new class of freshmen means he has the chance to prove his competence and fidelity to the chapter president, Todd (a chillingly good Lewis Pullman). When the school bans hazing activities from campus, members must move cautiously. But Mitch — Tom’s closest friend and roommate — starts feuding with pledge Gettys O’Brien (Austin Abrams) and adopts a more vengeful hazing style, making him a liability. To side with Mitch, a pariah in the frat, would mean risking his own good standing. Not defending his friend, however, proves equally dangerous within his own pledge class (its members played by Graham Patrick Martin and Angus Cloud, among others).
Hazing-related deaths and injuries in the U.S. aren’t collected in a single database, but the frequency with which they make headlines is chilling. The Line explores this reality convincingly and, with the assistance of DP Stefan Weinberger, Berger shows how easily these situations turn fatal. His cool directorial style treats the hazing scenes with a clinical touch, turning them into ethnographic studies.
That distance doesn’t help when it comes to The Line’s more interesting thread: how the fraternity activates Tom’s socioeconomic anxieties. The sophomore endures a lot of humiliation to gain approval: His olive skin prompts his frat brothers to refer to him as a “jihadi;” they mock his interest in Annabelle because she’s Black, doesn’t participate in Greek life or adhere to their standards of beauty. He tries, meekly, to stand up for himself, but the rules for acceptance are always changing. Tom’s inability to keep up becomes the true mark of his outsider status.
It would have been even more compelling, then, for Berger to have burrowed more deeply into Tom’s life — to explore his need to belong. His conversations with Annabelle are, initially, a way to do that, but they don’t go anywhere and her character ends up feeling inconsequential. As the film careens toward its predictable conclusion, questions about Tom’s desires and motivations keep cropping up. With no answers, The Line ends on a deflating, and strangely noncommittal note.
The stakes are higher for this working-class kid chasing his version of the American Dream, and my mind wandered back to Richard at the end of The Secret History. Realizing just how much trouble he might be in, the novel’s protagonist starts to panic and consider his situation: “What did it matter, if they failed to graduate, if they had to go back home?” he wonders of his friends in the classics major cabal. “At least they had homes to go to. They had trust funds, allowances, dividend checks, doting grandmas, well-connected uncles, loving families. College for them was only a way station, a sort of youthful diversion. But this was my main chance, the only one.”
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