Again, I wanted to watch this for a long time (a very long time, in fact) not only for Alexa Vega’s role, but also a rare post-Annie appearance by Alicia Morton, shortly after which she seems to have quit acting completely. I’d also heard seriously good things about the movie in general, and there aren’t many movies like this which I don’t find at least marginally more interesting than most others.

The problem initially for me was pretty much related to that… there have been so many other good movies on this subject – and this one seemed immediately to fall bang in between two of the best, Mean Girls and Thirteen, the former for its extreme bullying (albeit here with the humour stripped away) and the latter for its rawness, here found in Alexa Vega’s performance. It was interesting to watch this straight after Remember the Daze where she’s older and glossier. The only way I can describe Alexa’s face in this movie is, it’s like a Carpenters song… you know that empty, lonely, drained and sad but still beautiful quality their sound had? Something like that. You utterly believe her loneliness in this movie and that helps a ton in understanding a lot of her decisions.

What I wanted and hoped for from this movie, and it was a big ask, was some kind of answer to the behaviour it presents. Alexa Vega’s character here ultimately finds herself cornered with literally nobody that she can go to for help because all her trust circles collapse for various reasons and the bullying she is subjected to is not easily explained to anyone who isn’t involved. I understand that place well, and I kind of still find myself there sometimes, but like the mother here explains to her daughter at one point, I never really figured out how to deal with it.

Astonishingly, I felt like the movie kind of gave me such closure. Something far more satisfying than I expected, at least. This movie gets so sad and this girl’s situation so impossible that I really feared that it was simply that kind of movie, that merely presents the seeming unconquerable nature of these situations and leaves it hanging there. There’s a really excruciating moment following the girl’s attempt at suicide when she returns to school and once again accepts her “best friend”‘s apology with open arms and part of me was just hoping she was finally leading them on, setting up some kind of revenge. I kind of lost all sympathy for her once I realised nope, she was just that naïve (there are a lot of moments like this, it must be said, when the whole thing is a little too extreme to be believable). But then the truth comes out, and it’s the final straw, and she confronts the one person who hurt her most and says something simple but perfect,

“You have nothing that I want.”

It worked for me, anyway. I don’t know about the state of bullying in schools today, there are a lot of people over on this movie’s IMDb board claiming this kind of thing never happens and certainly not these days: but I believe that it could happen, anywhere; that these situations don’t just occur in school; and that for anybody who finds themselves in such a situation, or anything even close, would find a light at the end of the tunnel in this movie. It’s the best performance I’ve seen yet from Alexa Vega, truly haunting, and the rest of the cast aren’t too bad either (Alicia Morton is particularly frightening, about as far removed from her button-nosed Annie as you could get). Really worth looking for.