Review: Bad Girl

Sara West is a rebellious teen who has just moved into a new home with her adopted parents, who are frankly well and tired of her shit. West, naturally, has plans to skip out on arrival with friends. When plans change, West smokes some crack and then goes back home. Anyway, things really pick up when West meets neighbour Samara Weaving and the two become fast friends. However, is their friendship healthy for one another? And just why is a police detective (Rebecca Massey) looking for Weaving and calling her by a different name? Someone has secrets about to be unravelled, and that may not be the only thing unravelling.

This subpar 2017 thriller from writer-director Fin Edquist resembles a plethora of other subpar thrillers, with even its twists and turns being age-old. I find it bizarre that writer-director himself has said in interviews that the script ‘always felt like a bit of a telemovie to me’. How’s that for promoting your own damn movie? Although her rather posh accent jars with her character’s roots, Samara Weaving and Sara West are both perfectly acceptable in the leads, but that’s about all I can say in the win column here. In fact, the actors playing West’s parents are so bad they should be doing those awful insurance ads on TV where two people supposedly having a normal conversation stare askew of each other and mouth words that no human being would actually say to their spouse. Kiwi-born Rebecca Massey is even worse as a suspicious police detective. She’s an Easter Island statue.

There’s also no subtlety to it, with Weaving’s character being entirely predictable, and West’s black lipstick-sporting ‘wild child’ character so overblown she’s doing crack within the first teen minutes. I also take issue with the sex scene, which in addition to skimping on the ‘goods’ (It’s a subgenre requirement, don’t look at me like that!), but it’s also poorly lit and focuses too much on faces…before we get some coitus interruptus. Why even bother? After 45 minutes, not a damn thing had even happened, so perhaps no one really did bother here. It gets less and less interesting the longer it goes, and either needed to be more professionally done, or at least trashier to get any value from it.

Crap local blend of “Thirteen” and “Poison Ivy” leaves no cliché spared, and comes from a subgenre that’s already been old-hat for a good 20 years or so. Overblown, unoriginal, but the two leads are OK.

Rating: D+