Director Marco Siega’s Pretty Persuasion begins with an essential fake-out of its mood, leading you on to believe that it’s just a slightly edgier take on the cut-throat puberty politics immortalized in Heathers. By the time the movie reaches its tragic, gutting ending, you realize that the film’s slicing superficiality belied a far darker core just as its lead character, Kimberly, wasn’t so much a misguided popular girl as a sociopath in bloom.

It’s easy to criticize this movie for biting off more than it could possibly chew, and in the end, the cultural criticisms levied in the story would be far better serviced if not embedded in the Hannibal Lecter rewrite of Mean Girls. But at least Pretty Persuasion tries to envision why the exporting of American values could prove traumatizing as it’s the story of Muslim transfer student, Randa Azzouni, who ends up at the martyred end of a web of sex, lies, drugs, and the trampling pursuit of fame.

Granted, this Muslim innocent eaten by the American devil-girl reeks of a simplicity that assumes being a woman in the Muslim world doesn’t come with its own indigenous trauma. Yet, watching her life rended into meaningless at the cross-section of our institutions — high school, the media, and the courtroom — it was difficult not to feel like perhaps our obsessions, our shames, and our pecking orders that reward pathology make living life from an authentically spiritual center next to impossible. Or, at the very least, fruitless.

Pretty Persuasion also seems to be asking us to consider our culture as an incubator for sociopathic behavior. As Kimberly, the main character, manipulates the school, her friends, family, and the entire media with oral sex and a marionette’s instinct for the pettiness of humankind, one wonders why these institutions seem ready-made for psychotic pliance. From the gullible jurors to the narcissistic journalist who can’t wait to get Kimberly into bed, everyone in the movie seems too morally compromised to be able to figure out the truth before Kimberly is ready to have the truth revealed.

As with most movies, the plot’s message amounts to little more than boxy clichés, and it’s the characters who carry the real weight and nuance. The final scene crops close to Kimberly’s face as we watch her discover that she’s imperially unparalleled in manipulation but emotionally barren. She quietly implodes under the weight of her own amoral, absolute power while never allowing her howling realization to disturb a single grain in her beautifully crafted surface. While it’s easy to pick at the film for its crass reductions of a complicated conflict in cultures, Pretty Persuasion deserves credit for showing us with disturbing clarity how easily high school can be paradigmatic for the entire world.  

Terry Sawyer