A girl at a private school for rich kids where life revolves around appearances is murdered and everyone, pupils and adults, become suspects - all of them with hidden lives and secret motivations - in the brilliant and utterly addictive 8-episode teen drama series ELITE on Netflix.
Imagine a fusion of How to Get Away with Murder with Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars with an incredible pace and narrative technique on steroids, and then you get ELITE.
Making for utterly compulsive viewing, ELITE revolves around a murder at the Las Encinas private high school in Spain, and with the victim's body discovered on the evening of a school dance that gets disrupted.
Everyone's backstories, motives and secrets are then slowly/quickly being revealed through time flashes in the first and subsequent episodes.
ELITE isn't a guilty pleasure, it's a pleasure, stringing you along with a can't-guess whodunnit and interesting and well fleshed-out characters who you want to learn more of and how they're all surprisingly connected. This happens through gasp-inducing but plausible back flashes revealing more and more of the overall mystery.
ELITE that became available on Netflix in October 2018 is an irresistible teen murder mystery and while it's originally in Spanish, you can watch with English subtitles, or switch to the well-done English-dubbed soundtrack that's not "telenovela English" at all. You won't focus on how they talk, you'll be spellbound by what they're doing.
Themes and topics spanning privilege, wealth, entitlement, race, different cultures, power, sex, drug use and addiction, sexual orientation and being gay, young love and romance, body issues and self-esteem, teen pregnancy, trust and family dysfunction, are all incredibly cleverly interwoven in ELITE to create a truly binge-worthy series with twists, jaw-dropping revelations, beautiful people and an overall murder mystery that hooks you and that you want to find the answer to.
While the teenagers go to school, all snark at each other (initially) and viewers follow their social media antics and see their cellphone messages, tagging along on their social doesn't make ELITE (feel) superficial.
In fact, it functionally deepens the narrative in a smart way, organically drawing you in even further into their hyper-connected, yet desperate, isolated, often anxiety-stricken world.
Everyone suffers from insecurities - even those initially doing the bullying including the teen queen - although all the rich kids, and now the new kids, are surrounded by a world of excess.
Even the poor kids and those always-do-the-right-thing teenagers who you initially think are heroes have hidden prejudices and desires that eventually surface. Another cool thing about ELITE is that you won't be able to guess the killer.
You literally have to watch every episode (not a chore) with the well-structured story that switches from locker rooms and bedrooms to parties and classrooms. ELITE feels as if you're really in a school and in these preppy teenagers' challenging, decadent, aspirational and painful lives.
The teenage girl who gets killed in ELITE is revealed in the first episode but because of back flashes is seen throughout the show, including the final episode containing the actual murder scene and revealing the killer.
Whereas in most teen drama series the characters often remain one-dimensional with little real depth - they're chosen to represent a stereotype and to fit tropes like "the school jock", the "school nerd", the "prom queen", the "ethnic outsider" - ELITE smartly builds in great character development as it unfolds for each of the characters.
Parallel to that runs a very layered story; one that moves briskly and one that doesn't conform to the tropes you know.
What makes ELITE a joy to watch is that it constantly goes where you didn't think it would go, or even thought of that it could go - it deliciously plays with the teen drama genre but still feels very grounded and real.
Once you've watched all 8 episodes of ELITE, take a minute to think back to where they all initially started and what your impressions were of them, and then what you think of them individually at the end.. Who do you like now? Who do you feel for now?
Why not mention any of the well-acted, well-cast, characters in ELITE and who they are? That would already spoil some of the viewing fun. Get to ELITE's school pool and just dive right in. It's a must-do binge-watch assignment that you will enjoy finishing.
ALSO READ: REVIEW. A girl at a private school is murdered and everyone's a suspect in the teen murder mystery drama series The Girl from St. Agnes on Showmax that's okay-ish but ultimately disappointing.
ALSO READ: REVIEW. A girl at a private school is murdered and everyone's a suspect in the teen murder mystery drama series The Girl from St. Agnes on Showmax that's okay-ish but ultimately disappointing.
