I promise, I'll burn all the evidence, I swear...
Holy shit. Saw Hard Candy last night with some friends and, wow...I can see why the audience had mixed reactions.
Spoilers under the cut--I know a lot of people who want to see this and haven't yet.
The basic plot is that Haley, 14, meets Jeff, 30, on the internet through a chatroom (any parents of teenage daughters are immediately and irrevokably justified in their long-felt fears of the internet and chat rooms). They agree to meet at a local coffee-shop, after a dubious chatting of three weeks.
While at the coffeeshop, the two chat about music, books, chocolate, and photography. (Jeff is a professional photographer--the scare possibilities here are ENDLESS.)
Haley teases him (by flashing him when she's changing shirts), flirts, and generally encourages him. Jeff responds casually, but without the intensity of a creepy, creepy bastard.
They head to Jeff's house, where Jeff proceeds to fix screwdrivers for them, and Haley promptly slips a drug into his.
When Jeff wakes up, he's tied to a chair, and Haley is there, smiling, telling him that she knows he's a pedophile, and where does he keep his dirty little secret? She finds said dirty secret, but Jeff swears he never hurt the girl who went missing.
Jeff protests his innocence...all the way to Haley's attempt to castrate him.
Yes, you heard me right.
She ties him to a table, straps on surgical gloves, numbs his testicles, yanks a scalpel, razor, and sissors out of her bag, and shaves him.
The camera angles during this scene are incredible, and it scares the hell out of you, because really, pedophile or not, no one wants to watch a man's balls get cut off. (I'm utterly convinced that every male in the audience was having anxiety attacks during this scene.) This is also Patrick Wilson's most amazing scene. You really think he's about to get cut, the way he's screaming and begging and crying. It's terrifying. And Ellen Page is glorious in her determined psychopathic vengence--she switches rapidly from cold and calculating to deeply caring and back, which just shows how fucked up her character is.
She proceeds to remove said testicles, and SHOWS THEM TO JEFF (and the audience, who let out a chorus of "EWWW!"). Then she grinds them in the waste disposer. Her line "...I guess they weren't brass."
Don't believe me? Go watch the film.
Afterwards, she showers, Jeff gets loose (and discovers a surprise, which I WON'T spoil) and tries to attack her in the shower.
She counters this, tazers him, and starts to set the scene for the ultimate climax. She writes a suicide note on Jeff's computer, sets up a hangman's noose on the roof, and goes up to wait for him.
He climbs the roof and greets her with a knife. She has his gun, but drops it after a minute, and makes him the cruelest, sickest, most degradingly delightful bargain I've ever seen.
He can hang himself by jumping off the roof, and she'll clean up all the evidence of the dead girl, and his pedophilic tendancies, or...she'll tear off her clothes, call the police, go screaming into their arms, and Jeff will go to prison.
"Terrible things will happen to you in prison, Jeff," she whipsers in his ear. "This way is so much better. Take the noose, wrap it round your neck, jump, and no one will ever know! They'll just think you're a sad man who couldn't keep on living. I'll clean up all the evidence...they'll never know."
In the end, her choice, and his, are terrifying. As is his ultimate confession.
"I never killed that girl," he whispers. "I just watched...and took pictures, while Aaron killed her."
"You know what, Jeff?" she coos. "Aaron told me you killed her...right before he hung himself."
Hard Candy is so intense, and terrifying that the audience does not know who to root for--the girl hell-bent on vengance, to the point that she throws aside all sanity, or the man who is tortured by past deeds, and has so far escaped judgement and punishment.
In the end, there is no hero, and no villian, and all the film's a shade of grey.
Spoilers under the cut--I know a lot of people who want to see this and haven't yet.
The basic plot is that Haley, 14, meets Jeff, 30, on the internet through a chatroom (any parents of teenage daughters are immediately and irrevokably justified in their long-felt fears of the internet and chat rooms). They agree to meet at a local coffee-shop, after a dubious chatting of three weeks.
While at the coffeeshop, the two chat about music, books, chocolate, and photography. (Jeff is a professional photographer--the scare possibilities here are ENDLESS.)
Haley teases him (by flashing him when she's changing shirts), flirts, and generally encourages him. Jeff responds casually, but without the intensity of a creepy, creepy bastard.
They head to Jeff's house, where Jeff proceeds to fix screwdrivers for them, and Haley promptly slips a drug into his.
When Jeff wakes up, he's tied to a chair, and Haley is there, smiling, telling him that she knows he's a pedophile, and where does he keep his dirty little secret? She finds said dirty secret, but Jeff swears he never hurt the girl who went missing.
Jeff protests his innocence...all the way to Haley's attempt to castrate him.
Yes, you heard me right.
She ties him to a table, straps on surgical gloves, numbs his testicles, yanks a scalpel, razor, and sissors out of her bag, and shaves him.
The camera angles during this scene are incredible, and it scares the hell out of you, because really, pedophile or not, no one wants to watch a man's balls get cut off. (I'm utterly convinced that every male in the audience was having anxiety attacks during this scene.) This is also Patrick Wilson's most amazing scene. You really think he's about to get cut, the way he's screaming and begging and crying. It's terrifying. And Ellen Page is glorious in her determined psychopathic vengence--she switches rapidly from cold and calculating to deeply caring and back, which just shows how fucked up her character is.
She proceeds to remove said testicles, and SHOWS THEM TO JEFF (and the audience, who let out a chorus of "EWWW!"). Then she grinds them in the waste disposer. Her line "...I guess they weren't brass."
Don't believe me? Go watch the film.
Afterwards, she showers, Jeff gets loose (and discovers a surprise, which I WON'T spoil) and tries to attack her in the shower.
She counters this, tazers him, and starts to set the scene for the ultimate climax. She writes a suicide note on Jeff's computer, sets up a hangman's noose on the roof, and goes up to wait for him.
He climbs the roof and greets her with a knife. She has his gun, but drops it after a minute, and makes him the cruelest, sickest, most degradingly delightful bargain I've ever seen.
He can hang himself by jumping off the roof, and she'll clean up all the evidence of the dead girl, and his pedophilic tendancies, or...she'll tear off her clothes, call the police, go screaming into their arms, and Jeff will go to prison.
"Terrible things will happen to you in prison, Jeff," she whipsers in his ear. "This way is so much better. Take the noose, wrap it round your neck, jump, and no one will ever know! They'll just think you're a sad man who couldn't keep on living. I'll clean up all the evidence...they'll never know."
In the end, her choice, and his, are terrifying. As is his ultimate confession.
"I never killed that girl," he whispers. "I just watched...and took pictures, while Aaron killed her."
"You know what, Jeff?" she coos. "Aaron told me you killed her...right before he hung himself."
Hard Candy is so intense, and terrifying that the audience does not know who to root for--the girl hell-bent on vengance, to the point that she throws aside all sanity, or the man who is tortured by past deeds, and has so far escaped judgement and punishment.
In the end, there is no hero, and no villian, and all the film's a shade of grey.