Honor Society, a dark comedy about prestige-obsessed high school students, opens with familiar faces of pop feminism: Beyoncé and Billie Eilish. They’re the faces Honour Rose (Angourie Rice) sees on her wall as she undergoes her lengthy morning routine before senior year – white strips for her teeth, jade roll on her face, straightener on her blonde bob.

It’s a surprising, deliciously delusional opener that underscores this deceptively cutting, darker than you’d expect film on the prestige-obsessed, directed by Oran Zegman in her feature-length debut. A senior in a small town in what could be anywhere in the north-east, Honour has one goal for high school – to get out of it – and one idol only: Harvard, whose acceptance rate she knows off-hand. Honour looks the part of the all-around good girl beloved by admissions committees – she founded the karate club, edits the student newspaper, captains the volleyball team, runs a food bank for the less fortunate, all while keeping her grades up.

She also breaks the fourth wall, a la Fleabag, an overused trope of late which fortunately works here because we learn how everything, every blown kiss to her basic friends Emma (Avery Konrad) and Talia (Kelcey Mawema) or polite smile, is a chameleonic act in service to her singular obsession with Harvard. What could be a tiring focus on neuroticism becomes, in David A. Goodman’s barb-laden script and Zegman’s slick direction, a refreshing portrait of a real, if overrepresented, American phenomenon – ruthless competition to get into elite universities – in comical isolation. It is enjoyable to have a female protagonist acknowledge that her sole motivation is to make other people envious, to see the ideal of being well-rounded made so villainous.

When Honour learns that she’s one of four students in the running for her guidance counsellor’s recommendation, who picks one student per year to recommend to his best friend, a Harvard alum, she furiously schemes to ruin her rivals’ grades with a ludicrously complicated plan.

The final third half of the film requires Honour to go from borderline sociopathic to seemingly sincere – a huge stretch for any character, even one as interestingly layered as Honour. A dark twist in the final act, though surprising, rocks the boat, and Honor Society struggles to stick the landing and thread the needle between sour and sweet, campy and sincere. The ending chorus of conclusions wraps up a bit too neatly, though that doesn’t invalidate the enjoyably deranged ride before.