The Kids Are Not Alright

As the tour bus wends its way through the Serbian mountains, the poor, put-upon classmaster (Tihana Lazović) explains the history of the Balkans as a meeting point between West and East, Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam. She explains how the national Nobel Prize-winning author Ivo Andrić used a bridge as a metaphor in his landmark work. Can anyone tell us its name?

Sitting in the Congress Hall, which resembles more of a symposium hall than a traditional kino, I felt my hand shoot up. “The Bridge on the Drina (1945),” I wanted to say, having bought the novel in Belgrade and read most of it on Tito’s train to Bar. But the kids, caught up in their own petty dramas, looking at their phones, vaping openly on board, do not answer. They do not care. 

These Serbian kids are completely divorced from the culture of their own country.¹ I know it sounds dramatic on my side, but it’s like a Brit not knowing Shakespeare or a Russian Pushkin. And perhaps too, the lessons of history… 

It’s a subtle moment that’s indicative of the bleak vision of 3 Weeks After (Miroslav Terzić, 2026), which, in its deeply pessimistic view of the kids today, shows simply how vacuous and empty-headed these teens truly are. And in this absence of culture, only meanness remains. Displaying a true mastery of craft, Terzić’s third film is an unremitting exploration of young society that pulls no punches in displaying the infinite cruelty of children. 

It’s easy to romanticise childhood, but for many people it is less enjoyed than endured. We all remember those one or two childhood bullies, a far cry from the American stereotype (easily counterable with a lunchroom confrontation or a bit of nerdy smarts), and something far more feral, like a wild animal. It is in this atmosphere that Andrij took his own life. And it is in this atmosphere that the school decides that this is a perfect moment to take a school trip to Bulgaria, just 3 weeks after. They couldn’t be more wrong. 

Right from the beginning, Terzić, working with cinematographer Damjan Radovanović, uses long master takes to instil in us an impending sense of dread, the sensitive Tsotsa (Jovan Ginić) walking through a brutalist-looking socialist-era apartment block to the bus station. Already, the screenplay quietly teases the horrific backstory of what happened to Tsotsa’s best friend, Andrij, leading him to see a psychologist and withdraw from the rest of his classmates. This story — and its wider implication — is then dripfed throughout the rest of the film, a great example of how to withhold, hint and disperse information for maximal emotional effect. 

Things start to really take off in 3 Weeks After’s group sequences, a long pull into the back of the bus, the kids all piling into each other, playing cruel games while swearing like sailors. Already, Tsotsa is the butt of the jokes, his mental health struggles played for laughs by the other boys. Their ringleader, and future prisoner, is the vile Milos (Andrija Markovic), who, despite seemingly being banned from the trip, has snuck on board, and made it his aim to give Tsotsa hell. 

So we watch with dread, as Tsota, despised by the boys and girls alike — the boys because he is a soft target; the girls because he reminds them of Andrij, and in many ways, their co-culpability for his death — struggles to keep away from Milos and his cruel pranks, Terzić unafraid to truly go there in his depiction of school life as a dog-eat-dog safari. All we can do is watch, the horror slowly, brutally, unfolding. It makes Adolescence (Stephen Graham, Jack Thorne, Philip Barantini, 2025) look like Bluey (Joe Brumm, 2018-). 

“Sometimes things happen for no reason” is the classmaster’s mantra, who, in a remarkable act of psychic delusion, believes that Andrij’s death was simply unavoidable. But it’s clear that there are key structural reasons for his demise that relate to the way Serbian society has been organised. I can’t speak to that with any real authority, but you only have to look at the ongoing anti-corruption protests to know that something is seriously wrong.  

But there is a universality to the message here, and it’s probably to do with social media. A film this dark, with that particular slow style and devastating pans (including one reveal that is simply mesmerising in its implication and casual indifference), has turned me into a complete boomer. It’s time to take phones away from kids. Give them Ivo Andrić novels instead.