Jeff, playtime is over. Now it's time to wake up.
✯✯✯✯ 1/2
New Top 350 Entry: #207
If there's one modern actress I love more than Jennifer Lawrence, it's Ellen Page. She's a very talented actress whose looks mask her real intelligence. She's been in a wide range of productions- from X-Men to the little-known Peacock to the highly underrated Beyond Two Souls, I've never really seen her in anything I disliked. Hard Candy is probably one of her best performances to date, considering it was one of her first major film roles.
I admit that I'm a sucker for small cast films. The limited requirements for personal interaction can benefit certain films, since they allow the director to focus more on the story and the principal stars rather than becoming preoccupied with everyone else involved in the film as well. Hard Candy mostly takes place in one house, and throughout its runtime, Jeff (Patrick Wilson) is subjected to all manner of physical and psychological torture. Page's character, though she is only meant to be 14, displays an incredible intellectual depth that one doesn't normally see in younger actors. That's what I love about Ellen Page. She's so down-to-earth, and all of her characters feel sophisticated and thought out in their performances.
We know that Jeff is a suspected pedophile. He acts weird from the moment they first meet in the coffee shop. Jeff's strange behavior intensifies and gets stranger until just before the torture begins. What surprised me the most about Hard Candy, however, was the incredibly lengthy expositions that the films consisted of, rather than tons of hardcore torture. Oh yes, there is torture, and when it is there it's brutal. However, it is sparsely dispersed throughout the film, and most of the runtime is concerned with the character development between Jeff and Hayley (Ellen Page). Hayley reveals an unnerving amount of knowledge she has about Jeff's personal life, and she is shown as some sort of grotesque female Robin Hood- torturing the pedos while saving the victims of the future. We don't really know how or why she is concerned with the victims, all we know is that she is bent on a vendetta against Jeff, to ensure that he doesn't create any more victims.
Despite some open-ended elements of the story that aren't fully explained, Hard Candy is a thoughtful psychological thriller that has excellent performances from its two main leads. Page is a superbly talented actress, and the performance she gives here, especially considering she was so young at the time, is simply amazing. The story never fails to build its tension, and you will find yourself biting your nails with anxiety by the time its twisted conclusion reveals itself. The poster is somewhat misleading, to say the least. Don't underestimate this film just by its poster. Rather, be your own judge and watch Hard Candy for yourself. I guarantee you won't regret it, although you may be cringing a little afterwards...