The movie starts with an immersion break right at the first couple of minutes when an 8th grader delivers a speech and set of ideas which took Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Marx several decades to get to. Right after that the other kids respond with an equally unbelieveable idea. The movie lost me there at the beginning.
The child actors do not work well, but other flaws of the movie might indicate bad directing.
The pacing is off, many things happen without a care to explain, sometimes the emotions are completely off and baffling. I get it that the movie intends to shock and sometimes it achieves that but it's wholly undeserved and selfish.
Some exciting and thoughtful narratives, questions and answers are left in the dark, not articulated enough or sometimes not at all.
Maybe this is just a story that does not work as a movie.