Hard Candy

Hard Candy (2005) begins with a man and a girl meeting after talking online. He is a photographer in his thirties, she is fourteen. They go back to his house. Then the film inverts the expectation: she set the trap. The idea came from a real news story. Producer David W. Higgins had read about girls in Japan luring businessmen and robbing them, and his question was: what if the person you expect to be the predator is not. It was made for under a million dollars, and that was deliberate; given the subject they wanted to avoid studio interference. It grossed about 8.3 million worldwide. Elliot Page, credited then as Ellen Page, plays Hayley. It was the breakthrough two years before Juno, and almost nobody noticed. The notorious surgery scene does not actually happen. Hayley describes the procedure while reading from a medical book, and he later realises he is unharmed. The horror of the scene is entirely verbal. Critics divided. Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars; Jonathan Rosenbaum rejected the torture premise outright. It runs 104 minutes. Good for: two hander tension, films that provoke moral argument, and strong performances. Less good for: the subject is child abuse and the film discusses it directly. The torture scenes are psychologically heavy. Hayley's methods make the film's own moral ground contestable, and it never answers that clearly.