film | Choking hazard

Inject the Brothers Grimm with plain ol' grim, and you've got the queasy fable HARD CANDY, in which Little Red Riding Hood bypasses grandma's house, skips straight to the lair of the Big Bad Wolf, and ends up gasping, "My, what a gargantuan perv you are!"

The nasty tweak to Hard Candy is that its incarnation of demure little Red — a 14-year-old named Hayley (intense newcomer Ellen Page) — ain't takin' no shit off nobody, especially the wolfen Jeff (Patrick Wilson of Angels in America), a mid-30s professional photographer with whom she flirts in an online chatroom. She's initially all timid sweetness when they hook up at a coffee shop and decide to go back to his swank bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills, where drinks are mixed and coy smiles are exchanged. And then Jeff starts to feel woozy, keels over and awakens tied to a chair, at which point the squeamish predator/prey dynamic developed during the movie's first act begins to do cartwheels, and Hard Candy's true nature suddenly becomes much harder to peg.

Because the film's success hangs mostly on your reaction to its parade of gruesome shocks and twists, it's not too fair telling what happens next. But it's safe to reveal that Hard Candy tips a morbid hat to such melancholy psychological thrillers as Death and the Maiden, 8mm, Audition and Misery, the last one in a scene that involves a debilitating procedure waaay ickier than Kathy Bates whacking James Caan's ankles with a sledgehammer. It'll send 92 percent of the men in attendance racing to the exits while the remaining eight squeeze their legs together like they're working the world's rustiest thighmaster.

In the moment, Hard Candy is certainly harrowing material, and the taut performances of Page and Wilson glue your eyes to the screen. But as this disquieting revenge fantasy plays out, you might wonder why, well after the Jeff character is established as a disgusting creep, the movie turns into a deliberation of whether he's a really disgusting creep. The answer is glaringly obvious (thanks, telltale pan to a missing-child poster at the 10-minute mark!), and getting there hinges on an ill-conceived backstory that grows less interesting the more uncertainties it's swaddled in. But then the whole narrative remains ambiguous: The film frustratingly dances around the hows and whys of Hayley's histrionic search-and-destroy methodology, which, despite Page's fist-clenching fireworks, saps any emotional investment you might've built up during its understatedly unnerving early sequences. Such a pity to find Hard Candy done in by its own chewy center. C