‘The Line’ Review: Ethan Berger’s Compelling Look at the Groupthink of Greek Life

Writer-director Ethan Berger’s The Line wastes no time confirming all of our worst assumptions about Greek life. The opening credits play alongside photographs of American fraternities over the centuries, the fashions changing but the smirking white faces staying just the same. The very first interaction between Tom (Alex Wolff) and the rest of his modern-day fraternity brothers reveals them to be exactly the sort of big-mouthed, small-minded jackoffs that pop culture usually presents them as.

When Tom is with his fellow frat members, he’s all braggadocio and sexual innuendo. He even adopts an accent that his mother (Cheri Oteri) describes as a “faux Forrest Gump” in order to sound more like them. But while the other brothers are the scions of rich and powerful families—the fraternity loves to boast about how many future presidents and Fortune 500 CEOs the KNA has housed—Tom is a scholarship kid who spends the summer waiting tables so that he can pay his dues. He sees the fraternity, and the connections he can make within it, as his ticket to a better life, and so he’s willing to do just about anything to fit in with those good old boys.

From here, the story is effectively a Lord of the Flies tale staged inside a frat house, as we watch the brothers create and maintain their own social order. At the top is KNA’s president, Todd (Lewis Pullman), wielding the sort of restrained charisma that makes him feel like everyone’s cool older brother. And at the bottom is the new intake of pledges, though a spunky new recruit named Gettys (Austin Abrams) seems unwilling to accept this lowly station for himself.

That defiance endears Gettys to some of the brothers but not to Tom’s best friend, Mitch (Bo Mitchell). A heavy-set rich kid with a high-pitched voice and a boyishly cruel face, Mitch suggests a live-action Eric Cartman. He knows that he would be the Piggy of this group if it wasn’t for the existence of the pledges, and he treats them all the more brutally because of this.

The Line has been marketed as a “searing campus thriller,” but it’s actually more effective when it’s burning low and slow. The more extreme parts of its story, such as the violent and predictably tragic hazing sequence that it builds to, never achieve the howling, hysterical force of Gerard McMurray’s similarly themed Burning Sands from 2017. Equally, Tom’s relationship with Annabelle (Halle Bailey), a progressive-minded Black student who enrages KNA simply by existing, feels like a plot contrivance. Even making allowances for the dumb things people do in college, Annabelle’s willingness to sleep with Tom seems motivated purely by the film’s desire to add an extra level of conflict to its plot and never rings true on a character level.

Berger’s film is far more interesting when it’s looking at the subtler power dynamics at play within the fraternity. Whenever the guys are ripping on Mitch or Annabelle, we can see Tom silently calculating how much social capital he’s willing to spend fighting back. The answer is usually “not much,” and the same could be said about the other KNA members; whatever their own personal values, they won’t risk their place in the pyramid to defend. Wolff is excellent in his role, conveying the storm of intellectual activity going on behind Tom’s eyes and the essential weakness that will prevent him from ever following through on any of it.

We see similar acts of performance and compromise made all through The Line. The moment a parent appears on the scene, the bros suddenly code-switch away from the chest-thumping bravado and back to the delicate speaking habits they cultivated at home. They’re all the big man on campus, right up until someone threatens to call their father. The KNA is full of pampered princelings who wear their machismo like an ill-fitting costume, and The Line is at its most effective when it’s exploring the everyday oddness of this strange microculture.