The high-school melodrama is a staple of modern cinema – a subgenre sometimes explored with clever subtlety (John Hughes comes to mind), but often only used to examine derivative themes like a young person’s coming-of-age or search for identity. With Detachment, Carl Lund and Tony Kaye daringly craft a provocative story that subverts these commonalities – one which excavates the depths of people who do not carry undiscovered purpose or meaning, but rather, an emptiness so profound that it swallows their capacity for empathy.

Lund’s script (his only screenwriting credit), originally conceived as a series of vignettes, follows a wide cast of high school characters who realistically interact over the course of a substitute teacher’s one-month assignment. The substitute, a writing teacher named Henry Barthes, is the clear protagonist of the story, but his coworkers and students are each given an intentional amount of individual screentime that offers intimate, but detached looks into their lives. Lund never seems interested in well-rounding a character with a backstory or personal history, but instead uses Barthes’ brief exchanges with them to illustrate his disconnection from their pains and struggles.

Enter Tony Kaye, the acclaimed director of American History X, in his second narrative feature credit. Kaye’s career-long dedication to presenting complex issues meshes brilliantly with Lund’s experience as a public-school teacher, and their combined artistic visions form a film that explores its concept to its fullest potential. Take one scene, for instance, in which a student approaches Barthes to confide in him about her personal issues at home. Thanks to an earlier moment told from her point of view, the viewer is able to understand her plight, but Barthes is incapable of doing so because of his ceaseless focus on his own problems.

Lund and Kaye aren’t just trying to show Barthes’ titular detachment from other people’s emotions – they’re using his character to actively represent an entire community of apathetic individuals. Barthes life is not one without difficulty or trauma, but he hardly takes the time to consider the perspective of others. While a filmmaker like Gus Van Sant deals with similar ideas via a three-dimensional, spiderweb-like narrative in his 2003 Palme d’Or-winner, Elephant, Lund and Kaye opt to use a storytelling style that dwells in the details that remain unseen. By staying in Barthes’ detached perspective, they force the audience to latch onto him in a way that allows them to reflect on their own lives.

Detachment is not the typical high-school story that we’ve come to expect. In fact, it’s not a typical film at all. There has been (and always will be) a place for feel-good tales of student connection like that which can be seen in The Breakfast Club, but Lund and Kaye present a moviegoing experience that achieves the same effect in a dichotomous – and seemingly impossible – way. Through an inspection of devastating disconnection, they display a part of human nature that is universally relatable. In the words of Barthes in his early-film narration: “I am hard-faced, I am gone. I am just like you.”