Hard Candy Review- By Michael Carlisle

Title: Hard Candy
Year: 2005
Director: David Slade
Country: US
Language: English

 Ellen Page has made a career out of being an awkward teenage girl, despite being in her mid twenties. While she has been in incredibly popular blockbusters such as X Men: 3 and Christopher Nolan's mind altering Inception, she is most known for her comedy about teen pregnancy Juno. This faux indie film was considered to be so good it made Page an Academy Award Nominated actress. However, before Juno, Page would make the darkest picture of her career: Hard Candy.

After three weeks of chatting with the thirty-two year old photographer Jeff Kohlver over the Internet, fourteen year old Hayley Stark meets him in the Nighthawks coffee shop. Hayley flirts with him in spite of the age difference and proposes to go to his house. Once there Hayley accuses him of pedophilia, then begins to slowly torture him.

Hard Candy is not for the faint of heart; it is visually disturbing and very troubling to the mind. The film's castration scene will leave you sick to your stomach, you will likely not be able to get through the entire film. Despite having seen films like Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo: Or the 120 Days of Sodom, I still had difficulty getting to the end of this film. However when I arrived at the end I thought to myself; is Ellen Page's character supposed to be a hero or villain? Is she an innocent teenager trying to portray her brand of justice on the unsuspecting pedophile? Or is she a sociopath who preys on pedophiles and uses their criminal past as an excuse for torture.

I ask this because the film's qualities change depending on the moral nature of Page's character. If Page is supposed to be portrayed as sweet and innocent then Hard Candy is awful. The torture is so intense that one feels empathy for the pedophile and begins to loathe Page. If otherwise, Slade's film can be seen as a warning about those we meet on the internet; even a young woman can turn out to be a crazed lunatic. However Slade's film can also be boring and tedious. The writing cannot keep up with the visuals, thus the audience is forced to watch poorly paced torture porn long after the film made its somewhat philosophical point. Overall it's a preachy film that tries too hard to be edgy and controversial.

In conclusion, while Hard Candy tries to show some depth by making Page's morals ambiguous, it is incredibly shallow. Perhaps a victim of sexual assault would feel otherwise, maybe torture is the best revenge in their minds, but a person detached from that kind of trauma can't help but feel empathetic for Jeff. The poorly written monologues about morality are torture enough as it is. Hard Candy is torture porn masquerading as art. Piss on it! 1/5