Hard Candy: Critic Reviews

To watch Hard Candy is, at moments, to be very afraid, but the scariest thing about it is the fury of Page's talent.

More sour than hard, this highfalutin exploitation flick starts with an unsavory premise that quickly becomes downright unpalatable.

It's smart, funny, and surprisingly visually discreet. Some scenes may leave you doubled-up, but the overall effect is, as the saying goes, better than a kick in the balls.

Hard Candy, a highly original psychological thriller/revenge fantasy, can be bitterly hard to take and uncomfortably intense, but it's well worth consuming.

It's hard to find a warm spot in the heart for anyone here, or for those who created them.

Hard Candy is the rare movie that may be worthiest for the arguments you'll have after it's over.

[The film] contrives to wag its own finger at itself -- to have its bonbon and eat it too.

It's really a canny use of the medium to raise serious questions about point of view and empathy in the exploitation genre.

... a revolting piece of work.

Hard Candy is the kind of movie that fairly demands coffee and discussion afterward.

Hard Candy is tantalizing, brutal, fetishistic, gripping and exhausting, with plenty of moments for movie patrons to shout advice at the screen.

Seen as a film, seen as acting and direction, seen as just exactly how it unfolds on the screen, Hard Candy is impressive and effective.

Only two males working in perfectly mediocre pulp harmony would dream up an avenging teen angel like this one.

... icky, incoherent thriller ...

Hard Candy is a psychological thriller as chilling as a cold, serrated blade to the jugular.

Hard Candy is sweet poison indeed.

... a movie that will inspire discussions once it's over.

Hard Candy is supposed to be another cautionary tale about the dangerous risks of online chat-room dating, but ends up being just another psychological horror flick about pedophilia in which Little Red Riding Hood turns the tables on the wolf.

A spectacular performance by teenage thesp Ellen Page elevates this disturbing slice of designer shocksploitation into a film that's impossible to dismiss on principle.

What we have here is simply a spectacularly unpleasant horror show, or an attempt to out-outrage the trio of poison playwrights I've mentioned. And yet Nelson's imagination thunders away with such demon perversity that I eagerly await his next work.

It's cinematic S&M, a bondage-control game masquerading as a thriller.

It's well worth seeing, because it is well made -- apart from a few gaps in logic -- and well acted.

Hard Candy not only trips along a tightrope line between exploitation and art; in some ways, that line is its subject.

There's a lot more going on here than just a revenge fantasy. These are two fascinating characters, and watching them thrust and parry proves to be as impossible to turn away from as observing a grotesque roadside accident.

There is nothing sugar-coated about this taut, timely psycho-thriller.