Oran Zegman’s Honor Society takes the well-worn machinery of the high school comedy and points it somewhere nastier than usual. Angourie Rice plays Honor Rose, a senior whose entire existence has narrowed to one goal: a recommendation letter from her guidance counselor, Mr. Calvin, that will get her into Harvard. Rather than simply working harder than everyone else, she draws up a plan to knock out her three closest rivals. The film treats this scheming not as a subplot but as the engine of the story, and it commits to that premise with more nerve than the genre usually allows.

Rice carries the film. She plays Honor as someone fully aware of her own ruthlessness, never asking the audience to like her so much as to keep up with her. It’s a performance that holds ambition and doubt in the same breath, and it’s the reason the character’s later unraveling lands instead of feeling like a screenwriter’s pivot. Gaten Matarazzo, as Michael Dipnicky, gives Honor an opponent worth falling for: he plays the role loose and slightly off-kilter, which makes him a believable match for someone this calculating. Christopher Mintz-Plasse, as Mr. Calvin, underplays where a lesser film would have pushed him toward caricature; his dry delivery keeps the counselor’s office scenes from tipping into farce.

The rest of the target list gets less room to breathe. Armani Jackson’s Travis Biggins and Amy Keum’s Kennedy Park register mainly as obstacles to be cleared rather than people, which is presumably the point from Honor’s point of view but leaves the film a little thin whenever it cuts away from her. Ben Jackson Walker’s Gary and Kelcey Mawema’s Talia fare worse still, sketched in just enough to justify their place on Honor’s list before the story moves on; Avery Konrad’s Emma gets a similar shrift. These are the roles a script like this tends to shortchange, and Honor Society doesn’t fully escape that trap even as it works hard to subvert the rest of the formula.

At home, Michael P. Northey and Kerry Butler play Honor’s parents, Marvin and Janet Rose, and their scenes do quieter work than the caper plot: they suggest, without over-explaining it, where Honor’s need to win might have come from. It’s a smart use of a small amount of screen time, and it gives the film’s later emotional turns something to stand on besides the romance.

That romance is where the picture stumbles hardest. The shift from Honor’s calculated takedown of her competitors to her unexpected feelings for Michael needs patience the film doesn’t quite give it; one stretch of plotting simply gives way to the other, and the change in Honor’s priorities happens faster than her character work has earned. It’s the one place where the writing feels like it’s catching up to its own premise rather than driving it.

Even so, the film’s willingness to let its heroine be genuinely unlikeable for long stretches sets it apart from most studio-adjacent teen comedies, which tend to soften their protagonists’ edges long before the credits roll. Honor Society keeps its title character calculating almost to the end, and trusts Rice to make that watchable rather than off-putting. Released on Paramount+ on July 29, 2022, the film found a warmer critical reception than its streaming-comedy peers, with particular praise going to Rice, Matarazzo and Mintz-Plasse for performances that gave the material more weight than the premise alone would suggest.

What lingers isn’t the plotting mechanics of Honor’s scheme but the tonal balance Zegman manages to strike: a comedy about academic ambition that’s willing to admit how ugly that ambition can get before it lets anyone off the hook. It’s a rougher, funnier film than the high school comedy label usually promises, and its flaws sit mostly at the edges rather than at the center.