A tense two-hander concerned with sexual exploitation, psychological tension, and the gut-level reactions inspired by on-screen sadism, Hard Candy may be western filmmaking's closest analog to date to Takashi Miike's Audition. Both films are about a man who treats women badly in some way -- and makes the mistake of inviting one who's rather psychotic into his home. In Audition, the widower's crime seemed gentle, or almost comedic -- he claimed to be a producer casting an imaginary project when he was really looking to meet new-wife material -- but resonated as a symbol of a large-scale trivialization of and willingness to deceive women. In Hard Candy, the root of 14-year-old Hayley Stark's rage (directed at Jeff Kohlver, a 30-ish photographer who met her in an online chat room and has invited her to come home with him) is less obvious because screenwriter Brian Nelson is busy playing psychological games with his audience.

From the opening scene, which features only a computer screen displaying flirtatious real-time chat, there's a bit of a smugness to the whole affair -- which is fine to a point, because the film's easy confidence is what makes the opening reels so unnerving. Particularly strong is Ellen Page's performance as Hayley. She comes across as a really smart kid, but a kid just the same, whose heart and brain are running at a million miles a minute. Jeff (Patrick Wilson) thinks he's plying her with drink, but she slips him a micky and then we're off to the races.

As you'd expect from a movie written by a playwright that features only two significant characters and takes place largely on a single set, what ensues includes a lot of stagey talk talk talk. Director David Slade, a music-video and commercial veteran, has an arresting visual style, working in close-up and using shallow planes of focus and dramatic color schemes to punctuate the action on screen. (He shot film and later manipulated the image in high-definition video.) And the early scenes depicting Jeff's real-world rendezvous with Hayley, first at a local diner and then at his apartment, are supremely icky and hard to shake. But what the script really has on its mind is the continuous, tedious reframing of an argument against Jeff's baldly predatory behavior -- and maybe against the girl who wants to hold him accountable.

You might think that once a charming 30-something dude invites a high-school freshman to his bachelor pad and starts offering her liquor, he's crossed a line. But Hard Candy wants to push that line to and fro, manipulating and challenging your preconceptions as a viewer and realigning your sympathies between Jeff and Hayley. So Hayley loudly brands Jeff a pedophile (he objects), based mainly on the gauzy large-format photographs of (clothed, as far as I could tell) young women hanging on the walls of his place, and starts digging through his shit looking for out-and-out child pornography.

Narratively, this is all a mistake. You can't overthink this material. For my money, all Hayley has to do once she turns the tables on this guy is stare his ass down and yell, "You tried to get me drunk so you could fuck me!" and it's game over. She's 14, for Christ's sake. How important is it to find out whether the guy has a stash of porn squirreled away when he's already demonstrated himself to be a wannabe perpetrator? Tie him down, cut off his nuts already. I'm with you. Instead, we get a steady multiplication of Jeff's alleged transgressions, from sexual predator to consumer of kid porn to creator of kid porn to out-and-out murderer.

There's a suggestion that Hayley is simply out of her gourd, projecting on her captive a pattern of criminal behaviour that isn't in evidence, but it's countered by the film's real sense of outrage -- which seems out of balance until, in one of those fits of cleverness in which a screenwriter attempts to make sense of a narrative only after it's already unfolded, the real story is revealed at film's end. Finally, Hayley's motivation is made clear. We understand why she went after this guy. What makes no sense is the tortuous, half-assed methodology she employs in getting him.

Unlike the genuinely shattering Audition, Hard Candy ultimately lacks the balls to follow through on its most discomfiting promises, choosing instead to wallow in a surfeit of final-reel tidiness -- after all that ambiguity, it ends in a comeuppance that no viewer can really argue with. So as a full-on rape-revenge movie, it's a failure (Ms. 45 would totally pwn this guy). But as a middlebrow exploitation vehicle, and maybe as wish-fulfillment for a generation of girls who don't intend to be played by charming creeps, it's probably sharp enough to leave a mark.