‘High School’ Review: Amazon Freevee’s Tender Portrait of a Teenage Tegan and Sara (2024)

As titles go, it doesn’t get much more generic than Amazon Freevee’s High School, which could suggest anything from a broad parody to a high-minded documentary to a gritty reboot of High School Musical. What it probably doesn’t suggest is what it actually is: a tender portrait of two teenage girls that draws its strength from its knack for unvarnished details and uncommon sense of empathy.

It also just so happens to be a music biopic of sorts, given that it’s adapted from Canadian indie pop duo Tegan and Sara Quin’s memoir of the same title. But you don’t have to be able to name a single tune of theirs to appreciate High School on its own merits. You just have to be familiar with that uniquely adolescent pain of realizing that growing up can sometimes mean growing apart from those you’ve loved, hopefully to find your way back again — or at least open to letting High School lovingly detail that experience for you.

Set in the mid-’90s, as indicated by pitch-perfect period details like the wallet chains swinging from the characters’ hips, High School finds identical twins Sara (Seazynn Gilliland) and Tegan (Railey Gilliland) navigating uncharted territory in more ways than one. Practically speaking, they’re starting grade ten at a new school in suburban Calgary, away from all the kids they’ve grown up with. More challenging, though, is the distance that’s sprung up between them over the summer. Sara’s started ditching Tegan in favor of more time with her best friend, Phoebe (Olivia Rouyre), and the more Sara pulls away, the more tightly Tegan seems to cling, prompting Sara to pull away more firmly still.

Showrunners Clea DuVall (who also directed the first three episodes that screened at TIFF) and Laura Kittrell have an eye for tiny details that define the girls’ interior arcs and the intersections between them. The camera seems to recognize when Tegan or Sara have crushes before they themselves do, lingering on the back of one classmate’s head or leaning into another’s smile. It certainly notices when Sara stubbornly refuses to look at Tegan because she’s mad, or when Tegan clocks the unwritten hierarchies that guide the school’s social scene.

The Gilliland sisters match that care with precise performances of their own — they’re first-time actors who were discovered by the Quin sisters on TikTok, although you wouldn’t know it from their naturalistic performances, or their effortless charisma. Neither Tegan nor Sara is much given to over-explaining themselves, but Seazynn Gilliland can speak volumes with Sara’s tired glance and Railey Gilliland with Tegan’s flirtatious giggle.

The show’s real masterstroke, however, is its structure. Every half-hour installment is split in two, with each half following a different character. The not-quite-twist is that the stories typically overlap in time, intersecting here and there as they go. For instance, when Sara and Tegan call their mother Simone (Cobie Smulders) from a house party in the first half of the second episode, we’ll get to see Simone’s side of the call, including the stressful day that led up to it, in the second.

More than a gimmick, the bifurcation is key to High School‘s rare emotional sensitivity. The stories contained in these halves are often ones shot through with loneliness and anxiety, as characters struggle to understand what’s changed in their relationships or withdraw into themselves rather than open up to their loved ones. But the structure allows us to see what these characters can’t, to understand where certain people are coming from even if — as in the case of a segment about Phoebe’s perspective on her friendship turned romance with Sara, woven through with her fear of being found out for dating a girl — they seem reluctant to explain it for themselves.

It also, crucially, forces us to regard Sara and Tegan as separate entities than as a singular set of twins, at exactly the time that they’re starting to explore who they might be apart. Sara discovers drugs and falls in with a couple of rebels from drama class, while Tegan discovers she really, really likes hanging out with her new bestie, the appealingly brash Maya (Amanda Fix).

Eventually, of course, we know their paths will converge around music, though High School sidesteps the usual overwrought clichés about prodigies clearly destined for musical stardom. On the contrary, when we follow Sara to a piano lesson, the teacher winces at her atrocious, unpracticed playing. By the end of episode three (out of eight total for the season), the Quins haven’t so much as picked up a guitar. To start, the series takes the subtler approach of weaving their influences into the plot: The girls dance in the living room to Hole, watch Bjork get interviewed on TV, rock out at a Green Day concert.

In those moments, they could be anyone. They could become anyone. Reality has already laid out their paths for them, but Tegan and Sara don’t know that yet at this point in time, and High School isn’t eager to rush them there. Instead, it offers them the understanding and space they need to become the fullest versions of themselves, and in doing so tells a story that former teenagers anywhere — rock star or not — might be able to connect with. Come to think of it, maybe the universal appeal of its title makes perfect sense after all.