I've never been so uncomfortable watching a movie in my life.

The story is a man goes to meet a 14 year old girl that he's been talking to online. He ends up taking her back to his house, but it turns out she isn't the sweet little girl he thought she was...

I don't think a word like "disturbing" can really capture the feeling of the movie. Watching this creep (who, admittedly, is a little too charismatic for a pedophile, but having a clear evil monster probably wouldn't have worked as well) hit on this little girl...the disturbing part was their initial scenes together are played like a typical 'first meeting' scene between two consenting adults. Witty banter, albeit a bit childish on her part, but the speech is all 'getting to know you' kind of stuff that could possibly take place with two adults, which in the end makes it about 4 billion times creepier. If this guy had been some cross-eyed mouth breather that drooled all over the place, it definitely wouldn't have worked.

Once the twists start taking place (and they aren't exactly brain busters), the movie takes on more of an "Audition" type tone, where you are left feeling kind of ambivalent towards either character. The guy is obviously a sick, sick person, but can you really justify what's happening to him? Is it ok to take matters into your own hands? This is why the film is really disturbing, to me, because at times I was just wishing she would just let the guy go, which disturbed me again because I was somewhat rooting for this sick asshole to get away. For that, I think the film did its job. Made me upset and a little queasy.

Supposedly, the title refers to a term for an 'underaged girl' in Internet lingo, which I wasn't aware of. What I thought when I saw the title (and the girl's Little Red Riding Hood outfit) was that it was a play on the term "hard pill to swallow," the connotation being that the lessons this guy was being taught were hard to take, hard to look at in the mirror. Plus switching it to "Candy" instead of "Pill" keeps the kid motif.

Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde from X-Men 3), who plays the girl Hayley in the film, has a great face for showing emotion. She seems to drop off sometime in the middle, but for the most part I was pretty impressed by her performance. Patrick Wilson plays the pedophile Jeff well, keeping him just over the creepazoid line so as to not make him too easy to categorize, which again makes the character that much worse. Since these two characters interacting take up 95% of the screentime, their strong performances were critical to keep the film legit.

Really another thing that made it rough was the fact that this kind of stuff does go on...probably right now there is some dude going to pick up some confused little girl out at a mall somewhere, and unfortunately, she doesn't have her wits about her like Hayley does. Knowing this kind of stuff is real made it worse for me, kind of like Men Behind the Sun.

The movie is shot really well, lots of nice use of color, if not a little obvious. Since Jeff is a photographer, his flat is painted in all sorts of colors which lets the director use lots of visual representation of the two characters; lots of reds (which switches from character to character), and a very sick pink color that covers Jeff's bedroom and bed, which you can probably guess the connotation for that. The colors kind of reminded me of I Dismember Mama, though obviously this movie uses them just a smidge better.

Make sure you are ready for this film if you go to watch it; it isn't exactly an easy Saturday afternoon matinee kind of flick. It is designed to put you through an emotional wringer and even left me feeling a bit dazed after I finished it. Pretty rough stuff.

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