Day 66: Hard Candy

Believing him to be a paedophile and a murderer, 14 year old Hayley (Ellen Page) meets with Jeff (Patrick Wilson) and gets him to take her back to his house. The situation goes from light to dark pretty quickly and, thankfully, not in the way that you expect. (This whole blog is going to be spoilertastic. I know all of them are but really, you should watch the film first.)

There is a missing girl and Hayley knows that Jeff is involved. She initiates their meeting and innocently plays along to his ‘flirting’, and then suggests they go back to his house. Once there, the two drink and he shows her around his studio, where he tries to justify taking pictures of underage models. She made the drinks and she slipped him something to knock him out and when he comes to he is tied to a chair. He thinks it’s a sex thing but she quickly helps him realise that it is not it at all. She goes through his entire house to find evidence that he had something to do with the missing girl’s disappearance and she finds his safe and the evidence she was looking for. He panics and tries to get away but she manages to knock him out again.

This time when he comes to he is strapped to a table with ice on his balls. Hayley tells him that first she is going to shave him and then she’s going to castrate him. He freaks out and pleads with her but she is not to be deterred. She even sets up a camera for him so he can watch. He is convinced she has castrated him but in actual fact it was all just set up to look that way. What she’s really after is for him to voluntarily kill himself and she says if he does, she’ll destroy all evidence of his involvement with the missing girl. Jeff says that he didn’t kill her, he just watched as it happened but that he can tell her who it was so she can go torture him. But she already knew who it was and she has already convinced that man to kill himself, so it’s just him left. After some contemplation he decides to go ahead with it and he steps off the roof of his house with a noose around his neck.

This film is excellent. I wish I hadn’t known the plot before I watched it because I would’ve been gripped, believing it was all really happening. Ellen Page has such dangerous eyes, you totally believe she could do this. Definitely her best acting, I think. Really embodied the role of a girl with some serious psychological baggage.

“I am every little girl you watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed.”

9/10