Hard Candy (2005)

Warning: Do not read unless you have seen Hard Candy.

A computer screen: Lensman 319 chats, Instant Messenger style, with Thonggrrrrl14 and does not flirt so much as write cringe-inducing sexual overtures. Thongrrrrl agrees to meet him: cut to portentous black – I was hooked. They meet in a coffee/pastry shop and we meet Hayley (Ellen Page), 14, ostensibly all wide-eyed innocence and seeming very susceptible at first, as Jeff (Patrick Wilson) wipes cake-cream residue off her bottom lip with his thumb and forefinger clenching her chin suggestively at the same time, immediately establishing his sexual dominance.

They talk in the coffee shop and he realizes she is no ordinary girl: she is, at first charming, then troubling, in her precocious ness. They go back to his place, and my disgust with Jeff turned into sympathy and my sympathy for Hayley turned into disgust, as she quickly establishes her intellectual dominance with her smug dismissive analysis of his personal belongings, and he struggles to keep up while remaining cool despite his rapidly deteriorating superiority. He offers her a Screwdriver, but she reminds him of the foolishness of accepting a drink from a stranger, especially when the mixing of the drink was out of sight. She says she’ll make the drinks, and when she brings his to him, he drinks and before long, he is disoriented and has lost consciousness.

He awakens to a gloating Hayley and tied to a swivel chair. The rest of the film is Hayley gloating and torturing him, physically and psychologically, while Jeff earns the audiences’ sympathy more and more with each panicked plea for mercy. His crime: being a pedophile that preys on underage girls on the Internet. In theory, this is an interesting role reversal, but as executed by the cocky, abrasive Ellen Page and the likeable Patrick Wilson, there is very little swinging of sympathies as the director and writer expect. From the moment Jeff finds himself tied to the chair, my sympathies were never with Hayley as her idea of justice is vindictive cruelty. So any elevated display of biting social commentary on the parts of the filmmaker devolves into pointless sadism and moderately compelling cat-and-mouse games ending with an ineffective climactic confrontation between Jeff and Hayley atop the afternoon-sun-soaked rooftop of Jeff’s house. An idealized ex-girlfriend of Jeff’s is used as a weak motivation for Jeff’s acceptance of Hayley’s offer to hang himself with a noose she had tied on his roof earlier. Hayley walks away from Jeff’s home, victorious in ridding the world of a single Internet predator, but proving absolutely nothing, except that individuals that torture scumbags are just as guilty of torture as scumbags who torture innocents.


Grade: D+