My Old School Review: An Unrevealing Account of a Stranger-Than-Fiction Hoax

Much like Tim Wardle’s 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers, Jono McLeod’s My Old School generates much of its suspense from withholding crucial information. Both Wardle and McLeod’s approaches are geared toward keeping us on the edges of our seats in anticipation of each new, carefully foreshadowed twist. But also like Three Identical Strangers, what My Old School gains in tension from laying a trail of breadcrumbs for its audience to follow is lost in an overall lack of depth or focus on the psychological issues and tumultuous struggles of its compelling yet confounding central figure.

McLeod’s documentary centers around Brandon Lee, who in the early 1990s arrived at Bearsden Academy, an esteemed high school in a wealthy neighborhood on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland. According to former classmates and teachers interviewed throughout, the school’s conspicuously named new student looked older than his classmates and was unusually intelligent, but they slowly shrugged off their suspicions, which was easy enough to do given how eager Brandon was to help others with their homework, even driving them around town. And any lingering doubts were seemingly snuffed out by the sympathy he gained from the death of multiple close relatives during his time at Bearsden.

It’s clear from the outset that there’s something fishy about Brandon and his backstory, yet most of the film’s first hour is edited so that the interviewees appear to be skirting around the big reveal as they describe how they got taken in by him. Brandon, too, is interviewed throughout, but since he didn’t want to appear on screen, actor Alan Cumming stands in for him, giving a face to the man by lip-synching his statements. It’s perhaps a necessary layer of artifice, and Cumming’s performance is so convincing that you often forget that he’s not the one speaking. But it also places the real Brandon at a further remove from us, making him come across more like the almost mythical, enigmatic figure that his classmates describe than an ordinary human being who conspired to commit an extraordinary deception.

This stubborn avoidance of the details of Brandon’s scheming is allayed in the final half hour of My Old School when the filmmakers finally get around to addressing their subject’s alarming actions and the various moral questions that they raise. It’s interesting to see how varied the responses are from different teachers and students: Some still admire what he did for them, while others see him, at worst, as a harmless sociopath. And to the documentary’s credit, it never steers the audience to feel one way or the other about the man.

But My Old School is so wrapped up in all the twists and turns of a truly bizarre (and headline-grabbing) story that it gives scant detail into the rationale for the extremity of Brandon’s actions. He gives a simplistic explanation for his behavior, but the fact that the filmmakers simply take him at his word rather than push him to discover why his end goal was so ridiculously important to him reveals a general disinterest in anything but the inherent juiciness of their true-crime account. The film is ultimately a perfectly entertaining retelling of an offbeat tale, but its superficial and borderline exploitative approach leaves one wondering what deeper, darker motives were really at work in this unstable man’s troubled mind.