Hard Candy

Plot synopsis:
The movie opens with a chat window between Lensman319 and Thonggirrrrl14. It is obvious that they have been chatting and they make a plan to meet at a local coffee shop that day at 11am. At the coffee shop (called Nighthawks after the famous painting by Ed Hopper) we meet Thonggirrrrl14, Haley Stark (Ellen Page) who is eating a piece of chocolate cake. Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) walks up to her. She turns and sheepishly smiles and asks, Jeff? She has chocolate on her lips and tells him it is amazing and he has to try it. He wipes the chocolate off her lips and sucks on his thumb. She tells him that he does not seem like the kind of guy that needs to meet girls on the internet (since he is clearly good looking). He says that he prefers it that way because he gets to meet the person first and that as a photographer, he has found that faces lie. She asks if her face lies. He studies her faces and says she is longing, wanting, needing . . . more chocolate. She laughs and a rapport is established between the two. She turns back to the counter and orders more chocolate and coffee and he pays for it. He also buys her a Nighthawks T-shirt. She models the shirt for him. When she is in the bathroom, she quickly opens the door to reveal herself in only her top and we see the Jeff is visibly agitated. He keeps saying that she is only a little girl and that he has to wait 4 years before he could be with her. They sit and talk in there for a while as the camera pans over a poster of a missing girl (Donna) on the message board behind them. He has an live concert MP3 of a band that she loves at his apartment and she invites herself over to listen to it even though they both decide that it is crazy to do so. As they are talking, he points to a huge book in her bag that she covers up and says is a medical textbook from her dad who teaches at a University.They drive in his car to his home. It seems to be some distance from town and they show the windy roads he takes to get there. Jeff lives in a clean well decorated apartment. There are pictures of scantily clad young models on his wall. Haley takes an immediate interest in these pictures and asks how many of these girls he has slept with. One in particular, Janelle, has the date 3/19 on it and Jeff gets antsy when Haley takes it off the wall. He grabs it from her and puts it back. He gets her a drink while she is listening to the MP3 and she says she doesn't drink anything she hasn't mixed herself. She goes into the kitchen and mixes screwdrivers. When Jeff is slow in drinking, she insists that he keep pace with her. She asks to be photographed and plays music loudly and jumps on the couch. He is getting dizzy and weak and finally collapses.When Jeff wakes up he is tied to a wheelchair and Haley has completely changed. The innocent shy girl we met in the beginning was just an act. She has come with a purpose. We learn that she drugged him and that she specifically chose this day to meet him because his neighbors were out and no one would hear him screaming. He accuses her of stalking him. She says that he has been stalking her. Haley has been chatting with him under many screen names on line with different ages and he was only interested in the ones that were under 18. Jeff claims to have had a connection with her. She accuses him of researching topics that she says she is interested in and reveals that she hates the band that she came over to listen to. She accuses Jeff of being a pedophile and says she is going to search his house for clues. He denies it saying he didn't do anything and that she invited herself and was the one being forward. She says that he is the adult and should know better.Haley searches the house and doesn't find anything. She thinks this is suspicious because men usually have some sort of porn around and he doesn't even have that. He does have records on his computer that pictures were downloaded but the pictures are not there. She suspects that this is where the kiddy porn is. In the search, she finds a gun in a box under his bed. She takes out the gun and throws in on the bed She finally finds a safe hidden in the middle of the room in a sort of coffee table with an inset that is filled with stones. Under the stones is the safe. She figures out the code of the safe as the 3/19 on the picture of Janelle whom Jeff is still madly in love with. His screen name also had 319. Her reaction to what she finds in the safe leads us to believe that is where Jeff has been hiding his kiddy porn, but of course, we never see it. There is also a picture of a girl in front of the Nighthawks. Haley throws the picture at Jeff and asks him why she gets to keep her clothes on. He says that he met her once at the cafe but that he never took her back to the house. He denies being a pedophile. The picture is of Donna, the missing girl from the poster in Nighthawks. It is now clear that Jeff had something to do with Donna's disappearance. He tells her to call the cops, that he will confess. She says that what she has in mind is worse but assures him that she does not want to kill him.She leave the room for some reason and he wheels himself to the bedroom and gets the gun. When he wheels back into the kitchen, she is waiting for him with saran wrap. She wraps his face until he passes out. When he comes to again, he is strapped to a wheely table with his pants off and a bag of ice on his genitals. Haley is wearing a green surgeon's smock. She announces that she will castrate him, goes into his studio and sets up his camera so he can watch it. He begs and cries for his balls but she says it is the only way. She begins to try to make a deal with him but then changes her mind. When she begins the surgery, we can hear the cutting noises and see blurrily the screen as the surgery takes place. When she is done, she holds up his balls and contemplates what to do with them. She jokes about seeing how far they will bounce. She finished by putting them down the garbage disposal. She then says she is done with him and she will take a shower and then call a cab and leave.He is furious now and struggles to get free. He manages to do so and immediately feels for his balls. They are still there! She didn't perform the surgery! He checks the video recorder and sees in the VCR a tape of castrations. He runs for the phone and almost dials 911 put instead gets the scalpel and goes into the bathroom for Haley. We can hear the shower running but when he pulls back the curtain, she isn't there. She is behind him with a taser. She zaps him and he falls into tub unconscious again. She then begins to clean the apartment of her fingerprints. In the most comic scene in the movie, Jeff is pathetically crawling in the hallway with the scalpel as Haley moves around him cleaning. She walks by him and zaps him with the taser again until he falls unconscious again.Then we see him tied up in a contraption with a noose around his neck and standing on a chair. She lets him know that she has called Janelle and that she is coming and will see the evidence that he is a pedophile. He freaks out at this. She offers him redemption in the form of a clean reputation. If he would hang himself, she would get rid of the evidence and no one would know that he was a pedophile and Janelle will think he killed himself because of his unrequited love for her. If not, she will see it and then what would she think of him? A neighbor visits at this time and there is a moment that we think Haley will be found out, but she isn't. She tells the neighbor that she is his niece. The neighbor asked her what she was doing on the roof because she saw her there earlier while she was in her garden. The girl slips up when she says that she was on the roof to check a leak. The neighbor informs her that she knows that it hasnt rained and with that the girls just runs in the house. He lunges at her and manages to free himself. She runs around the building, gets the rope and goes to the roof. He grabs a knife and finally finds Haley on the roof. She has his gun. She offers him the same deal again. A noose is set up on the roof. If he will hang himself, no one will know about the little girls. Jeff confesses that he watched and took photos of Donna but that he didn't kill her. He says he will give Haley the name of the person if she would spare him. Haley says she already knows the name and the funny thing is that Aaron said that it was Jeff who did the killing right before he hung himself. Jeff understands now that Haley has set this all up from the beginning. She puts the noose on his head and says, "I promise to get rid of the evidence. No one will know." Meanwhile Janelle has arrived and is downstairs ringing the doorbell. Jeff jumps. Haley looks over the ledge and says, "Or not"

Tags: comedy, suspenseful, cruelty, murder, mystery, psychological, cult, sadist, violence, insanity, claustrophobic, revenge, storytelling

Review:
The slow, suspenseful film is set mainly in the Los Angeles home of photographer Jeff, a 32 year old man whom Hayley, a mature 14 year old girl who met him online, suspects to be a pedophile.
It is a movie about Hayley (more than excellent Ellen Page) and Jeff, about pedophilia and about how a pedophile must feel.
It is more like disturbing to hear a teenage girl speak how she does, and it is fascinating how your feelings will go from one character to the other during the movie until you realize that no matter what the end is, everyone is guilty of something and it is not to us, humans, to decide what bad actions can be justified by other bad actions.Try on it, and be open-minded.Sorry about any orthographic mistake, I'm not used to English writing..
This sure is some thriller.Darn those MTV filmmakers,when they really use their heads they show some of their true visual talents.Like the debut made by Mark Romanek in One Hour Photo, David Slade really excels as a director who keeps things extremely intense and gripping with a touch of shocking elements and pure disturbance due to its story.A film about a pedophile who invites a 14 year old girl into his house only to lead a disturbing game of cat and mouse with shocking consequences and shocking twists.Along with the superb debut and impressive writing ,it is actually the young Ellen Page who carries the film.You won't find her not mentioned in any review to this film.Hers is a performance worth mentioning,because she takes a huge shift towards her character.
The effect is that the viewer never quite feels he's getting the whole story, and never really feels like he's engaged with the main plot line quite yet.Frequent reference is made to the male character's long-lost childhood girlfriend, but we never really meet her (her face is only shown briefly at the very last moment in the film).
By the end of the movie, you have a basic understanding of these off-plot events you didn't see and people you didn't meet...but it comes only at the very end, and it leaves you wondering why you watched the whole movie just to get that little bit of information.Another reason this film fails is the extended scenes of physical struggle between the two main characters.
I watched this movie tonight...throughout the whole movie it is the story of a little girl torturing a nice man simply because he believes he is a "pedophile." There is no justification to back this up, simply the love for a former model and a fully clothed picture of her.
It's a shame the film industry feels this way.In the entire file I was rooting for the stupid little girl to be murdered and was constantly spouting off things that the poor, tortured individual could do to escape from this evil bitch.WORST MOVIE EVER!!!
This film tries and fails miserably to raise the profile and problem of paedophilia, This film could have had a real impact on people but a very weak story ruined a good opportunity, it neither left me feeling uncomfortable nor wanting to do something to stop paedophile grooming via the internet.This film could have been used as a vessel to really get the authorities to notice and clamp down, but they exchanged story line to try and get shock value IE with doing 'grudge' like stunts and torture.Simply Awful.Avoid at all costs..
It's a 10-minute short stretched beyond belief by way of talk, talk, talk and then some more talk, talk, talk, like really bad one-liners, lame plays on words, characters speaking obvious things like it's some kind of debate on sexual matters that it's actually afraid to talk about.It's a PG-rated afterschool special posing as an R-rated "edgy" "indie" masterpiece.You'll find no gore or anything at all shocking in this movie, so don't bother torturing yourself is that's what you're expecting.To make matters even more annoying, this movie screams of first-time filmmaker.
Just Bad. I read the reviews, and went into the theatre thinking, "alright, this should be good" I was wrong.Basically a short film stretched out to about 2 hours, this movie was overlong with nothing happening.
Although I don't share the common guilty with Jeff (at least not now...), but I'm not quite sure in the days coming I won't hate or be afraid of teenage girls with short hairs and smooth tongue--not because the film successfully portrays the character, but for as obviously enough a reason as that you get sick, for the rest of your life, of somebody violently sweared to you without a cause.However, one point to its visual style, that's all.
The ideas are RETARTED, He is not a pedophile PERIOD he might find young girls attractive but last time I checked a pedo would much rather knock the little annoying excuse for a human out and go to town NOT SEDUCE HER WITH REAL HUMAN EMOTION (THIS MOVIE WOULD NEVER EVER HAPPEN), learn how life works before you make movies about life, don't run before you can walk.Don't watch it, yeah thats right don't is in my vocabulary.No No No No and No, this film is an example of the dropping intelligence of the human race, another example of scientist who could be saving lives but instead decide to make a new faster acting hair color.
People who could be recommending good movies to passers by like me instead of tricking us into watching ABSOLUTE GARBAGE because their morals are messed up and they are brainwashed by the system and the government and they live in fear.Thanks but no thanks i'll be sure to set out time in my life to mess up the live of people who recommend bad movies and worship fake, flawed, undeserving people/things..
The same could be said for the embarrassingly bad dialogue, but what else would you expect from a film completely focused on an out of character, sadistic, 14-year-old-girl and a mentally weak, pussy whipped child photographer.
the great acting in no way makes up for this sick propaganda.i guess there is a 10 line minimum for entering comments so disregard everything i am now typing as it is here to fill up space yes excruciating movie do not see unless you want to use it as fuel to write angry letters to the studios insisting that they stop putting out such morally reprehensible crap.
The close-up style certainly makes for (pleasing) uncomfortable watching but then the pudding is over-egged with the other effects (speeded up/slowed down action; changes in colour, shaky effects etc).The potential questions raised about victim/villain and what exactly is paedophilia are never addressed (despite what other glowing reviews might say) and what we are left with is a movie that is nothing more than a horror movie that is trying to be far to clever for it's own good.A real disappointment when you bear in mind that the topic of the movie should have provided for a really thoughtful and suspense-filled challenge to our notions of young girls and adult men..
HARD CANDY is a movie with a couple of excellent actors in the two lead roles and some nice photography...it goes without saying the script was all about exploitation, but it is utterly without nuance or cleverness of any kind.as is all too often the case with poorly developed and underfunded indie movies, this story (and the audience) would have been better served with a 20- to 30-minute short, rather than a feature-length mess.
the dialog, completely unbelievable/unsettling plus not to mention boring, to the sense where you start to figure out, within the first 5 minutes, that this movie isn't going anywhere good...(and it doesn't help that the whole film deals with a whining teenage girl; oh what could be worse) ....
Well to start off it doesn't deal with the issues; it seems to say the way to treat paedophiles is to castrate them; it says don't go to the police take the law into your own hands; it also has a smart mouthed 14 year old girl in the lead who we, as the audience, are not too sure about; is she mad or is she hell bent on some kind of mission or revenge?
She also has the dialogue of a mature woman when she should be speaking like a 14 year old - bad dialogue writing Mister Nelson.In the movie 'Misery' the audience has sympathy for the writer who has been kidnapped by a stalker; in this film we learn early on that the paedophile has been stalked but after the initial exuberance of his capture our sympathies seem to change when he is abused and tortured.
However, the direction and cinematography are brilliant and there is a technique in one of the tracking shots, used a couple of times, when we go around the table, out through a door and back into the room through another door to look at the scene from the other side of the room, which looks very impressive; there are also semi strobe like affects in a couple of the action scenes which I liked.The Internet is a godsend to paedophiles and if this film does nothing else at all it points that out; it is also aimed at a young female audience, where it might do the most good, so it is a pity that it will be rated 'R' in the US and '18' in the UK.I'm not sure of the significance of the red hood which is seen on the publicity cards and posters unless it is some kind of homage to Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now' or some reference to Little Red Riding Hood, as it is only seen for a fleeting moment during the movie.
There are also terrific performances from Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page in the two leading roles and a good directorial debut to feature films from David Slade but there are certain moments in this film when the audience claps at the same kind of things that were applauded in 'Thelma and Louise' which made me feel a little uneasy and 'part of the mob.' These scenes made a few male members of the preview audience last night at the Director's Guild squirm in their seats and hide their eyes so be warned  it isn't pretty..
The writing is awful, wordy and pretentious, and the director should have stuck with music videos, which this seems more like than a real movie.The only suspense or thrill involved is wondering if there isn't some way to kill off BOTH of these obnoxious characters before the end of the movie.Both Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page are at their worst, and Page is extremely lucky that (for some reason that I can't imagine) Jason Reitman cast her in Juno based on this performance; this movie is so bad that I doubt her budding career could have survived it without a much better movie right on its heels.
It's rare to find a movie that treats the subject fairly really, The woodsman is perhaps the only one recently.I'll keep this short and sweet, basically this movie makes you root for the bad guy, for the so called monster, simply because the female protagonist is so full of teenage arrogance and self righteousness it makes you want to vomit.If she had stopped at one point and not done the most terrible thing at the end, one could have maybe sympathised with her, even understood her motives, but no matter how you do it, she is guilty of far worse than the pedophile and so is beyond our forgiveness.Patrick Wilson puts in a really good performance and makes you give sympathy for the Devil, which is good, but really the poor character's fate is predetermined which is a shame.So we have two monsters and one decides to judge the other because their crime is taboo, even though the girl will comitt perhaps the ultimate crime, it's OK because it's not taboo.I heard this movie was bad and the girl in it was annoying, but I had no idea how truly disappointing this movie is, save your money and go watch something interesting of this pedo genre like 'The woodsman'.
At one point I was just annoyed at the constant impossible events just popping one after the other.On the other hand, the plot is cunning and original and the acting is good, but the development is absolutely nonsensical and the action improbable.In conclusion, the movie is worthwhile although personally I did not enjoy most of it..
The whole movie (that's about one hour and three quarters - still very long for me) was only about the vengeance or justice-making (or however you want to call it) of a 14 year-old girl towards a supposed pedophile.
Anyway, I think that maybe girls would like this movie more, because, well, it talks about an independent girl making justice for herself, but that's just for teenager girls probably seeing Hayley and saying "hey, look, a girl can be independent".
The movie is predictable and cheesy and the ending is of no consequence.Then there's this: if viewers are supposed to believe that a petite fourteen year old girl is capable of such things, then at the very least, she should have the power to consent to sexual intercourse, right?
And I actually admire Sandra Oh.There are a few good things though: the story actually plays out properly (in a cinematic/screenplay sense only, though it gets weaker and less watchable as it progresses), the character interaction is absorbing, and the acting is top-notch (Patrick Wilson is awesome in this film; Ellen Page is quite annoying and sickening but does her job well).
And when you learn the true motives and intentions of the characters, the first half of the film makes little sense.I'd also like to comment on the acting of Ellen Page - just because a young actress has so much dialogue and gets to pout and shout a lot DOES NOT MAKE HER A GREAT ACTRESS.
Hell, no: the only thing truly disturbing in this film was that poor little girl trying to act like a cold-blooded killer.
A 14 year old girl who says things like "Hayley" does when she first meets "Jeff" would instantly come across as too mature and is really not very authentic.
Since then Slade has gone on to direct "30 Days of Night" and the upcoming Twilight film "Eclipse."Ellen Page plays Haley, a 14 year old girl, who meets Wilson's 32 year old character, Jeff, over the internet.
Let me justify my summary: The character development is so incredibly weak that you are left to conjecture about the motives of the characters, or even their identities after you've watched it.The screenplay leaves little to be desired in terms of depth and is so horribly cliché that you'll think that you've stumbled upon some kind of MTV movie, which is actually a flattering category for this pile to be in.Ellen Page overacts her part to such an extent that she merely functions as a "mouthpiece for the writer" as another reviewer had put it; her exaggerated tone and uneven emotional transitions throughout the flick really make it feel almost as horribly directed as a high school play.The male actor does a mediocre job, but nothing that could salvage the terrible dialogue and unrealistic events that really prevent any kind of appreciation for the theme.Without "spoiling" (sort of like letting a dog turd dry in the sun I suppose) this flick, all I can say is that physics and biology is lost to the people who cast and directed this abomination.How it got more than 2 stars is a mystery to me; maybe there are just that many rabid feminists on IMDb..
This movie was a real hard candy to swallow!!!Ellen Page has no face expression, lacks emotions, it is clear that this girl lacks acting skills at all...Patrick Wilson brilliant as usual..I was laughing because some people said Jeff was a pedophile but my question is...Hayley provoked him all time and Jeff never touched her....should he be called a pedophile??
And it's in this climate of fear over paedophiles that this film is released."Hard Candy" is the tale of a fourteen year old girl, Hayley, who meets a thirty-something man online, Jeff, and who after three weeks of chatting, suggests that they should meet each other in person.
I do not understand how a man directed this film, it is a load of feminist rubbish.The lead girl is so annoying you want to rip your hair out and although the guy is a paedophile, he most definitely deserves both to live and to get his revenge by not just raping her but by raping her while she is hanging.At the end and it makes you feel like there is no justice for troubled man that needs help.
Made for a small budget (yet the production values are so very artistic that it feels like an expensive film), HARD CANDY is essentially a duet for two actors: the actors Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson deliver performances that become indelibly burned on the mind of the viewer.32-year old photographer Jeff has been chatting online with 14-year old Haley for three weeks using standard chat room seduction lines.
This movie focuses on two people, Hayley who is a 14 year old girl and a 30 something pedophile named Jeff.
The film is so serious at times, it was nice to get a chuckle here and there to allow audiences to take a breather from being pinned to their seats with suspense.Like I previously stated there are only two real characters in this movie those being Hayley and Jeff.
A big problem with this film is that we can't care about any of these people; Jeff is a creepy, but boring "photographer", who likes to photograph young girls, and talk to them on the internet.