What if you wake up from a 20-year coma and see everything around you has changed for good? You would feel lost, frightened and unable to keep up with the current cultural trends. Senior Year, the 2022 Netflix film, depicts such an uncertain scenario.
The movie is about a popular high school kid named Stephanie who suffers a major injury before Prom, leading her to a Coma from which she wakes after 20 years and finds herself in the midst of a lot of troubles.
She wants to finish her high school senior year, of which only a few days were left, on a high note, only to find herself bewildered with the recent trends and practices.
She reconnects with her old friends and acquaintances and finds out a lot has changed in their lives. As she still is mentally 17 years old due to the Coma, she finds it hard to interact with them.
At last, she realises, in the pursuit of popularity and fame, she had ignored her best friends 20 years ago, which she was about to repeat 20 years after as well. The movie ends in a happy ending with Stephanie getting along with her friends.
Senior Year is unique in the sense that it represents an existential crisis in a light-hearted way. It must be terrifying for someone to wake up all of a sudden and to see everything that was considered normal and natural for a very long time, have turned into something totally different. The movie also goes on to show the futility of high school popularity, which can be related to the cases of Colleges and Universities as well.
The movie also does a good job of mocking the life of 2022, which is full of fake virtue signalling on social media along with representing a perfect life on those platforms, which is far from the truth.
Rebel Wilson, the actress who plays the 37-year-old version of Stephanie does a commendable job in getting immersed in her character, which was humorous and bubbly at the same time.
The movie is light yet serious for anyone irrespective of age and has trended in Bangladesh as one of the top 10 movies on Netflix. The director has done a decent job in portraying many difficulties of midlife crisis in a quite simple manner.
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