Hard Candy

I literally always forget about the plot for things I put on a schedule.

Director: David Slade
Writer: Brian Nelson

This is gonna be fairly short because there isn't much to talk about specifically in terms of character or writing, my opinions on this are fairly general. Plus I only write like 6 notes on it because I was too sucked into it so I really have both a lot, and nothing to say.

First of all, I thought it was pretty good, Ellen Page plays the part of a young girl who's just out to kill a paedophile. I say kill, more rid the world of one. It's actually quite interesting that a young girl can do this sort of thing and seemingly not get caught, she can be calm about what she's doing but also worry about it when it goes wrong. It's amazing that a young girl can solve a crime and deal with it faster than the police can. She's managed to track down both the men who molested and killed a young girl and put an end to the both of them after getting confessions from the both of them. She never reveals who she is, throughout the film you think you know who this girl is, Hayley. Towards the end, you see that she's managed to lie her way through the whole thing. Was she even 14? We'll never know.

Then there's Jeff played by Patrick Wilson, known for playing Ed Warren in The Conjuring and Josh Lambert from the Insidious movies. He does a great job at playing a man who knows how to manipulate young girls, especially teenage girls. The way he consistently tries to shift the power from Hayley back onto himself is so interesting to see, the lengths he'll go to free himself from whatever it is she's doing is fun to see too, he tells her a story of his aunt who almost castrated him by fire as a child and the way he tells it is intriguing. He starts off panicked, occasionally repeating phrases, his movements are jolty, trying to break free from his bonds, he gives specific details then changes them. As the story progresses he gets calmer, more confident, like he knows that this is the story that will set him free, it has to be right? It isn't and he gets traumatised into thinking he's been castrated. He does everything he can to both get free and stay innocent if he's caught.

Just these characters alone are interesting, and clearly, a lot of thought went into them, into their development. There had to be a lot of time dedicated to these two characters because they're the only characters we see working off of each other. The psychological power play between the characters is intense. You feel Jeff's panic and calmness messing with Hayley's madness and intellect. If I have to do a character study on a character from film I would definitely do it on either of these characters. Maybe even both.

The camerawork is occasionally a little shaky, and I don't mean like a handheld camera capturing the feeling of first person walking, I mean Michael Bay action sequence shaky. However, unlike Michael Bay's disgusting shaking of the camera almost everywhere you look, here it works. It gives a sense of panic, it gives a feeling of sickness, the feeling of no control. It brings you more into the film than pushes you out of the experience.

The story is where I have problems though. The story is about a teenage girl who has managed to track down the killer of Donna Mauer, seduces him, meets him, psychologically tortures him into a confession and suicide. On paper that sounds fine but after watching I was left with some questions, such as how did she manage it? As I said before it's quite incredible that she managed to do that while the police were unable to. The film is based on suspicion, a hunch, that she has the right man. How could she be so sure of what he really did? What if he wasn't the one who did this? What if he was just some other predator who she was just blindly accusing and only gave her a confession so as to make her stop? Would his neighbour tell the police about his "niece"? What could happen to her after all of this? I don't know, but I was dragged so deep into this that I only started asking these questions while looking over all 6 of my notes.

If you get a chance you should definitely check this out, it's great if you're into psychological thrillers and power play between characters. I really can't recommend this enough.

This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's great, I'm open to discussion and I'm always interested to hear how you feel about this film. This is also a critique which is considered "Fair Use" under the Copyright Act 1976. If you like this film then go and support its creators by buying the DVD or Bluray.