Saw The Girl Next Door. Oh my god, this movie. It's the fictionalized retelling of Gertrude Baniszewski's crimes. A woman gets custody of two girls and begins slowly but surely torturing them, with the aide of her sons and sons' friends (of both genders.) The film is just ghastly. It's told from the perspective of a kid who is never really into the whole 'torture the orphan chick' thing but hangs out there anyway for thin reasons (really, of course, to provide sympathetic eyes for us to see through.) The worst part of the film is the slow sliding descent into full blown, strung up by the wrists torment. The sadistic children, aided and inspired by the horrible central woman, torture the girl (and her crippled younger sister) in lurid, sexual ways and also in uninspired, blunt-force ways.
The entire film is quite lurid. The bulk of the cast are child actors and their performances are amateurish and clumsy. The film sometimes has a very exploitative feel to it, with sensitive issues of abuse and a good helping of ugly gender issues being handled clumsily and luridly. The mother is often over the top horror-show and unbelievable. There's a scene near the beginning when the abused girl begs the witness/protagonist for some food which I believe. I also believe a scene where the mother twists the girl's words into an unintended personal attack. The subsequent grotesques I have a hard time believing, although I know that something like it must have happened.
I was a bit let down that we didn't get more into the heads of the evil mother and especially her children. I wish this because then I could have distanced myself a bit and become more analytical. As it is, they are unrelatable monsters. The film is anyway incredibly hard to watch and is a miserable experience. It's extremely effective at being upsetting. I had to pause the film for a while near the middle and just do something else for a while. Ugh. Awful.
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