Hard Candy



After internet chatting for sometime, a handsome fashion photographer named Jeff manages to convince 14-year-old Hayley to meet him at a local coffee shop and then let him take her back to his place. Jeff is quick to offer the young teenager liquor, and even lets her mix the drinks. Jeff thinks it’s his lucky day, but he’s in for a rude awakening when he unexpectedly passes out during an impromptu photo shoot. When he finally wakes up, Jeff finds himself tied to a chair and quickly realizes his little game of cat and mouse just got flipped on him. Because Hayley isn’t just a little naive 14-year-old. She’s a rather pissed off little internet sleuth who knows all about Jeff’s sordid history with underage girls and she has personally tracked him down so that she can enact her own personal form of bloody vengeance.



Hard Candy is another one of the films on the list of “The 50 Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen” that I had also known about for some time, but had just, you know, never gotten around to actually watching it yet. Partially because it’s known more as a thriller than a horror movie, but also because sometimes I’m lazy and I have long-ass watch lists. It is what it is. Though now that I’ve seen it, I can see why it ended up on that list, because it does have some pretty unsettling moments in it. Though watching it now also kinda felt appropriate for me right now, because after having viewed two movies in a row that featured pregnant women being psychologically tormented, usually to very bloody results, it felt like a nice change of pace to have the tormented being a grown-ass man. It’s sort of like a nice balancing of the scales kind of feeling, if you will. Not that you’re going to feel too bad for the man being tormented in this film, because the guy’s a Grade-A douche, and a molesting asshole and he kinda deserves whatever torment he gets. But I can pretty much guarantee that regardless of whatever the dude did, most of the gentlemen in the audience are going to be royally squeaked out by the form of punishment that Hayley chooses to inflict upon him.



That said though, the movie isn’t nearly as bloody as I expected, considering the subject matter. Oh, there is plenty of violence to be sure, and there is certainly some blood. But the thing is, you don’t actually see most of that blood. Yeah, there’s a streak here, and a smudge there, but almost all of the really gruesome bits of the movie are merely implied, not shown. Even the really horrific “snipping” scene the movie spends so much time leading up towards is almost completely bloodless, because the camera never pans down so you can see anything. What little of the blood/gore there is is either blurry, or just out of shot. I suspect this was partially done as a cost saving measure, because in order to avoid studio meddling the film’s budget was only around 1 million dollars. But it also doubles as a nice way to mess with the audience by making their imagination screw with them, turning the film into even more of a psychological mind fucker than it already is.


I guess she ran out of sutures.

But you also don’t see a lot of gore in this film, because that’s really not the movie’s main focus. The focus is the dynamic between the two main characters, played by Elliot Paige and Patrick Wilson. There are other characters, but only two other actors are even given lines in this film, including Sandra Oh, and both of them are only on screen for a couple of minutes each. Meaning they barely play a role other than to add in a bit more tension to the plot. So the entire film essentially rests on Paige and Wilson’s shoulders, and I think they do an excellent job on that end. Wilson plays a very convincing pedophile. Not the kind of unkempt, dirty-looking, “stranger danger” guy that most young girls would be smart enough to take one look at and do wind sprints to get away from him, but the suave, unassuming type that even a lot of grown-ass adults would be wary of. The kind of guy who thinks he can charm or manipulate his way into or out of any situation. And Paige does a great job of flipping between flirty and naive, to cold-hearted master planner/manipulator. You do have to really flex your suspension of disbelief muscle at times when she comes off as a little too “world-wise”, but overall I think it still works pretty good.



My only real issue with the film (other than Hayley being way too conniving and ridiculously prepared for a 14-year-old) was that the film just feels too long and padded in places. There were certain scenes that felt like they were stretched out or added to the film unnecessarily. I mean, no offense to Sandra Oh, because it’s nice to see her in, well, anything really, but that whole “there are no small roles” thing they say about acting is a big, fat lie, because her entire scene was completely pointless. Yeah, it was only a couple minutes long, so it’s not like it was a huge time sink or anything, but they could have cut that whole segment and the film would have lost nothing. It would have been different if her character had come back later to pose some actual threat of some kind, like maybe revealing she called the police or…I don’t know, something, but she doesn’t. Her character is dropped as quickly as she appears, so her addition feels like little more than a desperate attempt to add more tension or “drama” to the movie. Which is completely unnecessary, because the film has more than enough without it, making the inclusion of that scene and others like it even more puzzling.



Other than that though I thought the movie was…fine? I mean, I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t knock my socks off either. Don’t get me wrong, the acting is definitely great, and the use of color and the way they framed many of the scenes is often gorgeous. So on that end the film is stellar, and *chiefs kiss* to whomever was in charge of the film’s color palette, cause that was just lovely. It’s just that I…wasn’t all that engaged with most of the story, I guess. In movies like this I sort of expect the tension to escalate, but in this case once the film got to a certain point it felt like instead of going up the tension just sort of stalled, or even went back down in some places. I mean, it kept acting like tension was going to up and EXPLODE! at some point, but the film never actually managed to pull through. Kind of like a guy constantly revving and un-revving his engine next to you at a stoplight, only to then pull out into traffic at a perfectly responsible speed once the light goes green. It feels like a tease, is what it feels like. But it’s still a perfectly fine little thriller, and I liked it. And I especially liked how it subverted your expectations about how “the person you least suspect should be the one to be most wary of” trope that horror movies like to pull. I just wouldn’t call it one of my favorites. If you like psychological thrillers then it’s probably worth at least one viewing, if for no other reason than to appreciate the acting. Just know that some gentleman may walk away from this one feeling very squeamish.

Hard Candy is available on a variety of streaming services.

Hard Candy is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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