Plenty can go wrong on a school bus trip. In Serbia-born director Miroslav Terzić’s third feature, 3 Weeks After, what begins as a teenage hangout movie stretches into a stylized excursion through adolescent cruelty and the institutional impotence of the educational system, if not of state policy itself.
Opening at the precise moment of boarding, the film’s floating camera offers a charming round of introductions to the schoolkids, whose personalities read as either harmlessly endearing or slightly menacing along well-worn patterns — the nerds colonize the front rows, while the back seats belong to the unmoored prankster, clearly up to no good. Nor is the girl who cannot tear herself away from her phone, as she has devised the perfect scheme of smuggling aboard her ominous boyfriend, who belongs neither to the class nor even to its age group. And her silly plan works flawlessly, aided by a pair of checked-out teachers who could barely control a stone. Long-held takes inside the bus and drone shots from above build a teasingly mounting unease, until the camera settles on the face of a solitary teenager, Zoza. The seat beside him sits tragically empty, as it would have belonged to Andrija, his best and only friend in the class, who died by suicide just three weeks earlier. The grief Zoza radiates not only refuses to diminish, but its very weight irritates classmates eager to forget. And when the bus suddenly breaks down, so do the last brakes of morality for its riders, as an unplanned stop at a roadside hotel tips over from psychological taunting into a kind of torture that recalls Russian bandit cinema of the ’90s.
Loosely drawn from several real cases of child suicide and school bullying, the film arrives with a director notably vocal about its sociopolitical premise. Terzić conceived it, per the press notes, not as a reconstruction of any isolated event, but as a “reflection of the time we live in,” while hinting that childhood innocence is nothing to be taken for granted amid everyday violence normalized to the point of invisibility in the adult world. That exasperation of a parent and citizen, aimed at the meager support left for children who have faced darkness, also shaped his method, which rests on close emotional exchanges with the young cast.
Out of some 500 kids seen during casting, Terzić chose the 24 who form the film’s gang, and nicely orchestrates this harmonious hormonal mix of mismatched figures, one that sits perfectly within the film’s stylized wrapping. Little wonder, given Terzić’ long background in commercial work, that the craft work delivers such pleasurable polish. The camera holds a static, durational discipline, its meticulous frames loosened now and then by bolder angles — the lens tucked up near the ceiling, eavesdropping on a conversation from afar — while the palette dims with the story’s mood. On craft alone, the film sets a high bar within Karlovy Vary’s 2026 Crystal Globe competition. And in its long first stretch, 3 Weeks After recalls early Ruben Östlund at his best, or this year’s Cannes entry Meltdown (2026) from Manuela Martelli, another film in which a getaway slowly goes awry through strangely hypnotic accents that keep one guessing how the story will evolve and whether it will hold to its realistic frame.
The lively, dialogue-dense ride of the film’s opening settles naturally into longer and graver registers. With violence escalating, script and form also darken in evident harmony. But when catharsis arrives with the story’s most savage act of cruelty against its hero, 3 Weeks After plunges into an extremity of stasis, duration, and minimalism that in places feels too suggestive, even for the bar it has set for itself. Its central political message, one Terzić frames as a metaphor for the violence saturating society at large, ultimately exceeds his reach, and he can hardly sustain the elegance and mystery with which he lured us in. Still, he retains the tact not to turn an already painful finale into a spectacle of violence under the microscope. That less obvious gesture, rarer for the subgenre and its subject, refuses easy answers by retreating to an extreme long shot, while paradoxically drawing emotionally closer. Here the film wins most: in a dramaturgical evolution generous enough to offset how little 3 Weeks After adds to the savage cruelty of adolescence, cinema’s inexhaustible resource.
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