HARD CANDY (2005)

A little way into David Slade’s Hard Candy, Jeff (Patrick Wilson) awakes from a drugged stupor to find himself held captive by Hayley (Elliot Page, credited as Ellen Page), a supposedly 14-year-old girl whom he had invited to his home, presumably hoping to seduce her. At this moment, the confident primary colours and comfortable pastels of the film so far suddenly give way to a much chillier grey-white-blue palette, as Jeff realises his predicament: seeing things in the cold light of day has never been so literal and, eventually, Jeff will also be forced to confront some equally unpleasant truths about himself.

Things are bright and cheerful on the surface, but also ominous beneath it, from the beginning. In Los Angeles, ‘Thonggrrrl14’ (Hayley) and ‘Lensman319’ (Jeff) are flirting in a chatroom; they agree to meet at a local café. Already we can tell that the teenage girl is hiding something, even if we do not know exactly what. Jeff—a successful 32-year-old photographer—seems, if anything, more genuine than her, even if his ‘perfect gentleman’ act with the teen is clearly just that.

Hard Candy makes no secret of its intention to invert the usual sexual-predator dynamic: it’s Jeff who’s being manipulated here, and before long Hayley has invited herself to his house. Too careful to have made the offer overtly himself, he is delighted, to the point that he seems to have forgotten some of the adult wisdom he bestows on her: “When you work as a photographer you find out real quick, people’s faces lie.”

The disquieting undercurrents, the sense that something dangerous is about to happen, are confirmed when Hayley drugs Jeff and the palette changes. The reds that previously exuded positivity start to resemble blood. Murder is mentioned. “Playtime is over,” says Hayley. One of the ways Hard Candy is such a compelling film is that, despite the obvious ugliness of his intentions, we find ourselves at times just as anxious on Jeff’s behalf as we are on hers. Unlike in many revenge thrillers, we are not simply relishing the prospect of the bad guy getting his just desserts: here, against all our expectations, we may find ourselves more disturbed by the vigilantism than the sexual abuse, and that in itself makes us uncomfortable. We cannot overlook the conflicts in our own values that Hard Candy illuminates.

There isn’t necessarily a rational reason for this: it becomes evident pretty early on that he is guilty as hell, and his excuses are thin. But there is also a tinge of craziness (perhaps of sadism?) to her behaviour—she’s not a sympathetic character in the normal sense—and this, more than Jeff’s sordid secrets, puts us on edge.

The remainder of the film takes place almost entirely in Jeff’s house, with most scenes involving both actors. There are very few exteriors (a shot of a neighbour pruning her roses is almost the only time we see anything beyond Jeff’s property), and there’s not even much music—nothing at all to distract us from the relentless focus on Jeff and Hayley’s interactions. Other people are discussed at length, notably a former girlfriend of Jeff’s called Janelle and a missing teen called Donna, whom Hayley suspects Jeff of having abducted, but there are only two very brief appearances by anyone other than the central duo. Sandra Oh is just right in one of those roles, as the neighbour.

Some black humour from the character of Hayley and more broadly from screenwriter Brian Nelson—he plays amusingly with the “visitor at the door” trope of home-invasion films, for example—alleviates what might otherwise be unbearable tension a little, without ever becoming too big a part of the film: there is an element of genre satire but it is kept carefully in check, just one of several ways in which debt to Alfred Hitchcock can be identified in Hard Candy.

Slade’s direction (like Nelson, he was making his first feature film) also distances the audience from the narrative events a little: Hard Candy isn’t trying to be completely realistic. He had directed music videos before and their self-conscious artifice is on display here too. Characters are frequently shot against single-colour backgrounds, for example, and some sequences are jerkily speeded up.

Even so, Hard Candy is a slow-burn film. There is no let-up but there is certainly no rush, and some of the most effective moments of Slade’s direction are much less flashy. For example, a scene where the camera crawls almost imperceptibly over Jeff’s body while he tells a story from his childhood as if sceptically examining every detail.

Page, as Hayley, gets most of the limelight and the lion’s share of the dialogue but Wilson—just moving into film after a career on stage and TV (Angels in America)—is superb too; the sheer believability of his performance, perfectly poised between niceness and creepiness, perfectly blending anger and fear, is sometimes overlooked amid the plaudits given to hers. He does a great deal with the smallest of facial expressions: see, for example, the moment in the early café scene where she goes into the bathroom and his face turns just a shade grimmer, dropping the jolly pretence, or later on the way his self-assuredness begins to ebb as he realises what he’s been tricked into.

Page’s creation of Hayley is magnificently eloquent, too, and not just in the more dramatic moments when the camera tends to dwell on her face. In Jeff’s car, heading to his house, it’s her expression that turns more serious for an instant, revealing the hardness and determination beneath her bubbly act (also suggested by the film’s title). Hard Candy was released shortly before her 18th birthday (Page, now known as Elliot Page, presented as female at the time) and she was already experienced in TV and film, but this was her first lead role; broader fame would come soon with X-Men: The Last Stand (2006).

Indeed, it’s Page’s tour de force that saves the film from what might otherwise be a serious problem.

Screenwriter Nelson offers us no access to her inner character, a way in which Hard Candy differs markedly from films like Promising Young Woman (2020) where the motivation of the revenge-seeking female lead is thoroughly explored. Her name presumably isn’t Hayley; is she 14? Is she a victim of sexual abuse herself? Or is she exacting retribution on behalf of someone else, a friend or relative perhaps? Has she tied up and tortured sexual predators before? Is it specifically Jeff she’s targeting, or was he just in the wrong chatroom at the wrong time?

She seems to actively enjoy doing what she does to him; would she – and this seems troublingly possible—ignore any evidence that Jeff was, in fact, guilty of nothing more than an inappropriate invitation (in which case some of her plans would seem wildly disproportionate to his offence)? Can we trust anything she says, any more than a teenage girl can trust Jeff? There is not even the smallest clue to tantalise us, and this huge blankness at the centre of her character, the impossibility of even starting to pin down who she is and why she’s doing what she’s doing, runs the risk of making her seem more a metaphorical avenging angel than a human being. But Page is so commanding that you believe in the reality of Hayley for every moment that she’s on-screen.

By contrast, we come to know a lot about Jeff. One of the most significant details is only revealed very late in a cleverly unexpected way, though some others are perhaps confirmed too early: Hard Candy is more successful while there is some ambiguity about him, while we really can’t be sure where he sits on the continuum between essentially harmless fantasist and rapist-murderer, and while we don’t know whether to root for Hayley or feel she is a vigilante going too far. The film becomes less interesting as the nature of Jeff becomes clarified.

It’s legitimate to ask what the point of Hard Candy is, apart from delighting in the depiction of revenge and inverting the far more common storyline of a woman held prisoner and abused by a man, and perhaps it’s for this reason that the critics in 2005 were so divided. (Maybe some couldn’t imagine that Hard Candy might not have a bigger “point”—that a film with sexual abuse of minors at its core could be intended primarily as entertainment, albeit very dark entertainment.)

Manohla Dargis, writing in The New York Times, hated it: “More sour than hard, this highfalutin exploitation flick starts with an unsavoury premise…that quickly becomes downright unpalatable.” Others were more impressed; Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian appreciated the way it plays with our expectations and raises (even if doesn’t answer) questions about the nature of revenge; Todd McCarthy in Variety called Slade’s film “extremely accomplished”, and like Bradshaw, singled out Page’s performance as “self-possessed to an astonishing degree”. Although it was hardly a major hit, its low budget meant it was a commercial success, doing much better outside the US than in its country of origin.

Slade and Nelson collaborated again on 30 Days of Night (2007), a more lavish and more mainstream movie that also met with a mixed critical response. Hard Candy, though, sticks in the memory far more than that vampire flick. It’s not remotely subtle, and things do get a little too pat towards the end. But the story and its telling are—most of the way—immensely forceful, the challenges to our assumptions about perpetrators and victims are unsettling, and the acting is downright terrific.

USA | 2005 | 104 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: David Slade.
writer: Brian Nelson.
starring: Patrick Wilson, Elliot Page (credited as Ellen Page), Sandra Oh, Jennifer Holmes & Gilbert John.