No, it isn’t Haley-Joel Osmond the glossy-eyed child from A.I. with a vest-top on. This is a film even more sinister than that dubious image, and nothing, read, nothing will make the manly half of the audience wince more than what little Hayley is going to do to the predatory Jeff, who could charm a snake off a plane.
As they begin to tango around each other’s feelings and expectations, I felt ill in the cinema. He’s doing something very bad, but she’s out for his blood.
The film drags along, and most of the middle it is torturous exposition- but in a literal and agreeable way. There are questions that still hang. Is Hayley a few coffees short of a Starbucks? Is he even a paedophile? If so, isn’t it illegal for a paedophile to be played by anything less than a bloated shadow of a 50 year-old man?
Ellen Page does a disturbingly good job playing the calculating adolescent in this power-twist-power game. It doffs its cap to Audition, the Japanese super-horror classic, but isn’t as primal, and you’ll never be certain which of them has the upper hand.
Sadly it also begins to make you frenetically clutch at what plot-twist is coming next. As it descends into desperation, you wait for one more surprise, but there isn’t, or if there is, it was too minor to notice.
One of them will get their way. However, you may not see it coming....
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