My Old School Is a Fascinating Dive Into Scholarly Deception

Have you ever wanted to relive your high school days? Most of us grown-ups are glad to be well past graduation, firmly entrenched in adulthood without having to experience pop quizzes, proms, crappy school lunches and the all the awkwardness teen years can bring. In the new documentary My Old School, a Scottish man decides to do the unthinkable, trying to literally redo his high school experience, disguising himself as a Canadian teenager and returning to the school he attended as a youth.

A multiform documentary — one that weaves together performance art, talking heads and animated re-creations — My Old School recounts the odd tale of Brian MacKinnon. Yes, MacKinnon really was a man in his early 30s who decided to return to Bearsden Academy in Scotland as “Brandon Lee,” pulling the wool over the eyes of his classmates, school administrators and teachers (some of whom had already taught him in the past). If it seems a bit far-fetched that this many people would fall for an adult man pretending to be a high schooler, My Old School goes into great detail about the intricacies of Brian/Brandon’s deception, and how believable it became. It’s bizarre that this even happened in the first place, but it really seems like the perfect storm of a man being able to slip right back into a world that was difficult for him earlier in life, with hopes of making it better. 

It really helps to have a game number of Brian/Brandon’s old classmates gathered to help tell the story. The documentary also features Brian/Brandon himself, who doesn't appear on camera but rather lets his testimony be brought to life by actor Alan Cumming, who lip-synchs his dialogue. Cumming’s performance is stellar, and it’s an engrossing filmmaking choice to humanize Brian/Brandon without allowing the film to feel salacious. The documentary always finds the most riveting points in the story to fixate on, allowing us to see through Brian/Brandon’s eyes and through the eyes of those who were fooled. Everyone gets their day in court. 

“It’s as if you’re living in a film,” one former classmate says at one point of the faux-student's story, and the web of lies Brian/Brandon weaves to recapture his adolescence feels like it could only happen in a movie. The documentary thankfully avoids reading like a tabloid. Rather, it peels back the absurdity of what happened at Bearsden to reveal how and why a person could mount such a strange ruse and the human cost such deception can bring.