It is going to be impossible, I’m afraid, to review Hard Candy without spoilers. I knew very little about it when I saw it (except that it was going as a bit of a shocker), so every finely calibrated surprise registered with full impact and made it an extremely intense viewing experience. I suspect that’s the best way to see it.
It’s rather odd to be a film critic recommending that you don’t read my work, but I can’t say much about what is undoubtedly the movie of the week without giving too much away.
Jeff (Patrick Wilson) is a photographer in his early 30s who meets a girl on the Net. She’s Hayley (Ellen Page), and she’s only 14 — apparently mature for her age, and certainly capable of some flirtatious backchat, online at least, but obviously she’s also below the legal age for sex. If Jeff were to pursue the liaison (and he does), what he’s doing will be paedophilia.
Jeff can’t resist going to meet Hayley in the flesh, and can’t resist when she wants to go back to his place. Sex is not mentioned as such, but it’s clearly in the air; and she is certainly doing something of a come-on exercise — even some humiliation role-play that seems, up front, to put her in the dominant position.
The law presumes that someone under the legal age is not competent to ask for sex, or even to want it. Some 14-year-olds would dispute this; some, as Hayley demonstrates in Hard Candy, are capable of much worse things than wanting to have sex. We South Africans know this all too well.
What happens to Jeff and Hayley is that, almost as soon as they get back to his place, it all goes horribly wrong. Jeff becomes the victim and we are invited to sympathise with him — until that sympathy is forcibly withdrawn.
While being treated to as claustrophobic and edge-of-the-seat a thriller as anyone ever constructed out of two people in a confined space, we are also being emotionally manipulated. Yes, Hard Candy raises questions worth asking about desire and power, but it’s too busy finding the viewer’s squeal-spots to truly delve into the inner darkness.
That Jeff is revealed to be thoroughly guilty asks us to endorse Hayley’s actions. That is no more interesting than asking us to sympathise with Charles Bronson in Death Wish, say, and to feel good as he blasts away those bad guys who murdered his wife. It looks more sophisticated in Hard Candy, but the moral-emotional equation is just as crass as that.
Are we meant to emerge feeling somewhat sullied (as well as exhausted)? I’m not sure, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Moral ambivalence is good if it enriches one’s perspectives on an issue, but in the case of Hard Candy it may just mean the movie wants to have it both ways — which isn’t really fair, given the heavy moral issues it brings into play. Is its take on paedophilia a disguise for misogyny and fear of the female? Is it against teen sex and in favour of torture? It’s hard to tell.
Certainly it is technically an excellent movie, tightly scripted and inventively shot. It grips relentlessly, even terrifyingly. The viewer does a lot of squirming in his seat — and I mean “his”. What, I wonder not so parenthetically, will women feel? Perhaps they will just be put off by the whole idea, which seems inherently masculine in a thoroughly conservative, inverted-Rambo sort of way. It’s rather like that scene in Reservoir Dogs, once seen never forgotten — the ear-slicing scene. Hard Candy is a whole movie like that.