If just picking this movie up doesn't make you a little uncomfortable then you obviously know little about it. And that's probably not a bad thing. Hayley Stark and Jeff Kohlver meet over the internet and then decide to get together in person at Nighthawks, a local coffee shop. They immediately hit it off and head back to Jeff's place for drinks and...whatever. No problem, right? Except Hayley's fourteen and Jeff is thirty-two.

If you haven't seen the movie stop reading here!!! The important thing that you need to know is that this is a great little flick that will make you squirm many, many, many times.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about this was how small it was. Ninety percent of the running time is just Hayley (Ellen Page) and Jeff (Patrick Wilson). Neither actor was particularly well known at the time, though Ellen went on to play Kitty Pride in the last X-men movie. It was written by a playwright and filmed absolutely beautifully. David Slade, the director, is doing 30 Days of Night and if he does as good a job on that as he did here then it makes me drool just a bit more. Both films require building a lot of tension with very little action.

Hard Candy was also able to make me feel sorry for a pedophile, well almost sorry anyway. And it avoided revealing too much about Hayley. I'm left with so many questions about her and her motivations. Is she really a little girl? Is she some uber-stalker of pedos? Is there any relationship between her and the missing girl? Where is she headed next? Ellen did a fantastic job switching back and forth between Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.

Back to the filming for a second. I really wish I had a larger vocabulary when it came to these sorts of things, but the use of color and shadow is just amazing. That's all I can really say here about that.

Between this and Crank I've had two really good looks at the role of vengeance. Chev avenging his own death and Hayley getting some payback for every little girl that Jeff touched, looked at, etc. The revenge that Chev dealt out was swift and brutal. Hayley's was cold and calculating and brutal. Both used the tools native to what they were. Both ultimaterly seem satisfied. Neither pay any consequences, not that we know of at any rate. In real life though I don't think revenge works like that very often. Still, here it works and we get to cheer on the protagonist, even if it feels more than a little uncomfortable to do so. After all we're cheering a couple of psychos.