If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if The Breakfast Club ended not with emotional breakthroughs but with crowbars, F (also known as The Expelled) has your answer — though I’d recommend skipping detention altogether. Johannes Roberts’ 2010 British slasher tries to serve as a gritty social commentary on youth violence in modern schools, but instead it feels like an after-school special that got held back a few grades and decided to start stabbing teachers.
This film wants to be a mix of Assault on Precinct 13 and The Class, but the result plays like a PSA written by your angry uncle after reading one too many Daily Mail headlines about “hoodie culture.” The only thing more terrifying than the faceless teenage killers is the pacing — a slow, plodding shuffle toward scenes you’ll forget before the blood dries.
📚 “When Faculty Meetings Turn Fatal”
Our hero — and I use that word generously — is Robert Anderson (David Schofield), a once-proud English teacher who gets punched by a student, suspended for three months, and comes back looking like he’s been living under the bleachers drinking gin from a coffee mug. He’s divorced, depressed, and desperate to be taken seriously again, but in this school, that’s harder than surviving an Ofsted inspection.
Schofield is a solid actor — the man can glower like no one’s business — but the script gives him nothing to work with. His character is supposed to represent the collapse of authority in modern education, but mostly he just wanders the halls like a hungover ghost muttering about discipline. You can practically hear him thinking, “I worked with Ridley Scott for this?”
🧍♂️ “Attack of the Hoodie Ninjas”
Then come the antagonists: the hoodies. Literally. A gang of faceless, silent, black-hooded youths who infiltrate the school one night and start killing everyone with the enthusiasm of bored interns. They don’t talk. They don’t explain. They just loiter menacingly like the world’s worst youth group outing.
Roberts seems to think this ambiguity makes them scarier, but it mostly makes them confusing. Are they supernatural? Are they angry students? Are they the physical manifestation of teacher burnout? The film doesn’t bother answering, probably because that would require something called writing.
Their entrance is telegraphed with a milkshake hurled at a window that spells “U R DEAD,” which honestly feels like an honest review of the screenplay. If they wanted to be truly frightening, they could’ve written “INSPECTION TOMORROW.”
🔪 “Kill List: School Edition”
Once the lights go out, the body count begins — and somehow, it’s still boring. The librarian gets impaled. The PE teacher (played by Game of Thrones’ Roxanne McKee, poor woman) gets beaten. The headmistress gets it in the face. Every death is staged with the dramatic flair of a fire drill gone wrong.
There’s blood, sure, but it’s as visually inspired as a cafeteria meatloaf. You can practically feel the director whispering, “This’ll look gritty in post-production,” while the cameraman wonders if the lighting budget was spent on Red Bull.
The horror here isn’t the violence — it’s the editing. Cuts jump like a nervous substitute teacher, and the sound design ensures you’ll hear every dull thud in excruciating detail. Watching it, I realized the only thing more lifeless than the victims is the script.
🍷 “Teachers on the Edge”
Anderson spends most of the film staggering around the hallways like he’s trying to find his dignity in a locker. His alcoholism is portrayed with all the subtlety of a GCSE drama project — bottle in hand, sweaty brow, dramatic sighs. The headmistress, played by Ruth Gemmell, exists solely to be awful to him before getting punished for it, because F believes the best way to critique education policy is by murdering your coworkers.
Anderson’s daughter Kate (Eliza Bennett) is there to remind us that generational trauma exists, though she mostly contributes eye rolls and poor decisions. Their father-daughter dynamic is so strained you’d think they were acting in separate films. When he slaps her in detention, you can almost hear the script shouting, “CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!”
💡 “Suspension of Disbelief (and Everything Else)”
The film’s central premise — that an entire school can be overtaken by silent hoodie assassins without anyone noticing — might have worked if Roberts leaned into the absurdity. Instead, he plays it dead serious. We’re supposed to feel tense as the power goes out, but the tension never arrives.
By the halfway point, you start rooting for the hoodies, if only because they’re at least getting something done. The rest of the cast stands around whispering into dead phones and peering into dark corners like confused moths.
Every time someone picks up a flashlight, you know they’ll die within two minutes. Every time someone suggests splitting up, you know the director just ran out of extras. The police eventually show up — briefly — only to get dispatched in record time, proving that even law enforcement doesn’t want to stick around.
🏫 “Social Commentary, Brought to You by Panic”
F clearly wants to say something profound about the decay of respect for teachers, the breakdown of authority, and the fear of modern youth. Instead, it plays like a midlife crisis set to strobe lights. It’s not commentary — it’s complaint cinema.
Every line of dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who read one too many tabloid editorials about “kids these days.” Roberts seems convinced that hooded teenagers are the harbingers of civilization’s end. Meanwhile, the real horror is that none of the adults think to call for help until half the faculty are dead.
If Battle Royale was about rebellion, F is about resignation — watching older generations panic because the youth aren’t listening. Which is ironic, because the film itself doesn’t listen to logic, pacing, or its own audience.
🩸 “The Ending Flunks Too”
By the time Anderson finally grows a spine and fights back, it’s too little, too late. The climax involves him rescuing his daughter, stabbing a hoodie, and then leaving his ex-wife behind at the school. It’s meant to be emotional — a tragic moral choice — but mostly it feels like Roberts realized he was running out of runtime.
Then comes the final shot: Anderson driving into the night, traumatized but alive, while the camera lingers on the school. It’s supposed to be bleak. It’s mostly just relief — both for him and for us, because the film is finally over.
If this ending is a metaphor for British education, it fits: exhausted, directionless, and probably underfunded.
🧠 “Final Grade: Needs Improvement”
Johannes Roberts went on to make better movies (47 Meters Down proves he learned what tension looks like), but F is the cinematic equivalent of a substitute teacher who loses control of the classroom by lunch. The concept had potential — The Faculty meets Eden Lake — but instead we got Detention of the Dead without the fun.
The acting is competent, the cinematography occasionally moody, and the soundtrack… exists. But none of it adds up to anything more than a lecture about fear that doesn’t understand what it’s teaching.
So here’s my feedback, scrawled in red pen across the final page:
“Tries hard, but lacks focus. Overuses clichés. Shows promise but needs serious revision. See me after class.”
Grade: F
For “Forgetting to be scary,” “Forgetting to make sense,” and “Forgetting that horror should at least be fun.”
In the end, F stands not just for failure — but for “finally over.”
