Rather disappointing major swing-and-a-miss. Well acted and well made, starts well, has a decent denouement, and just sags terribly throughout otherwise.
I sexually confused adolescent is sent by his parents to an unusually strict boarding school where the small class of 7 manages to be a panoply of “freaks”: burn victim, tourettes sufferer, and, memorably, a 12-year-old femme fatale. They’re made to read the bible constantly, beaten with a switch, and slowly turn up dead one way or another. Suffice to say, things are not as they seem.
The early scenes, of the kid getting bullied at school and dancing around his apartment in an evening dress, are unusually well done for this kind of movie. Then, towards the very end, as everything falls to shit—again with the kid running around in an evening dress, BTW, andthis time with makeup, too, having been goaded into it by the 12-year-old femme fatale—it’s again really well done. If it had been as good all the way through as it was during those two points, it would have been a very good movie. And it really wants to be, you can tell. But it really isn’t.
It’s just muddled. It’s like they had two good ideas for scenes and padding them out with the rest of a movie. There’s some unfortunately muddled themes involving flashbacks to the boy’s grandmother, whose dress he dances around in, being captured by the Nazis in WWII, or something.
Still, the couple of good scenes are so good, and the acting so strong, that it almost achieved “bad but I liked it” status. Almost.