by MATTHEW HAYS

What’s a young, sweet, innocent gal like Ellen Page doing in a movie quite as down and dirty as Hard Candy? The film, written by L.A.-based playwright Brian Nelson and directed by David Slade, has a smooth-talking, sexy photographer in his 30s (Patrick Wilson) cruise a feisty, precocious 14-year-old girl (Page) on the Internet. Soon enough, the two plan a rendezvous, meeting at a café to talk about life. And then Wilson invites Page back to his house.

And that’s when the fun begins—or horror begins, depending on your perspective. The set-up looks like pure cliché, and you expect that Wilson will be tying up, torturing and raping his teen prey within about 30 minutes after arrival time. But Hard Candy—at times a bit too self-consciously, it must be said—works to rewrite, reverse and undermine the often misogynist underpinnings that run through the history of suspense and horror movies. Page, as it turns out, has plans of her own, and is soon drugging and tying up the unwitting Wilson. She’s convinced he’s guilty of a pretty serious crime, and is hell bent on getting the truth out of him. She stops at nothing, and the filmmakers go to all lengths to make us (the audience) cringe at her tortuous antics—which include an excruciating castration scene.

Trailer park girl

It’s all light years away from the quirky character the Halifax-born Page played while an aspiring 13-year-old actress, when she appeared in a recurring role on the cult TV series Trailer Park Boys. Indeed, fans will find her unrecognizable in this vigilante role, bound to be a sure-fire hit with the all-men-are-rapists set and Andrea Dworkin Fan Club.

“To be honest, when I read this script I wasn’t considering how controversial it might be,” says Page, now 19. (The film was shot when she was 17.) “I just remember being utterly and completely blown away. I could not put that thing down.” Page says she was taken aback by the brazen teen at the film’s centre, a young woman who would take action rather than let perceived injustices go uncorrected. “Here was this 14-year-old with so much passion and intelligence. She had no reluctance to go ahead with her plan. At that point I just desperately wanted to play her.”

Page reports no parental resistance to her taking on Hard Candy. “My father was a little bit, like, ‘Are you sure you want to get in this person’s head?’ Then he read the script too and could see it was very well written.”

Gender-bending butchery

And Page concedes a big part of her intrigue with the script is its conscious upending of cinematic tradition, one that has women getting gratuitously mutilated and cut up at the hands of men, from Psycho to Silence of the Lambs to The Cell. “But it’s hardly just in film,” she’s quick to add. “It’s the media in general. I’m really surprised how uncomfortable a lot of men have been while watching this. I mean, you can turn on the TV on just about any given night and see a Law and Order show in which a naked woman ends up in a dumpster. Now the men can have a turn.”

Page says the castration scene—sure to be Hard Candy’s most talked about—wasn’t that difficult for her to get into. The real challenge as an actor came with “getting close to my character. For me it was about connecting with her on an emotional level. And making people not ignore the acts she’s avenging. Getting to her heart. And I think at essence she’s a good character—one that’s hard to get close to, but good. I mean, I’m not advocating vigilantism. She has a very evident bias. But I found her symbolically beautiful. She has so much passion.”

Page, who will also be seen in X-Men: The Last Stand later this summer, says that she “gets off on” challenging herself as an actor. “I really am so grateful to have work like this. I felt like I was doing Hard Candy for the benefit of humanity. When people leave the cinema, I hope they will be asking themselves lots of questions. We tried not to give any easy answers. Some have said it’s a preachy movie, but I really don’t think it is at all.”

Hard Candy opens Friday, April 28

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