Election Day
2013 · 11m · United States
Directed by Zach Wechter
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, tense
A high-school student-government election escalates into a cutthroat political thriller, proving there is nothing meaner than American high-school politics.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The audacity of playing high-school politics as genuine political thriller—not parody, not satire, but *legitimate* menace—is exactly the kind of genre inversion that should feel ridiculous but somehow doesn't, and that's where Wechter's subversion lives.
A technically assured escalation that channels the procedural precision of adult political cinema while maintaining formal awareness of its own tonal tightrope; the editing rhythm and mise-en-scène suggest a director fluent in thriller grammar applied to an ostensibly lightweight subject.
The film hinges on treating the cafeteria and hallways with the same compositional weight as a war room—a single, sustained choice about visual scale that transforms what could've been a joke premise into something genuinely unsettling with minimal resources.