Girl

The endur­ing mys­tery of whether Bel­la Thorne – Dis­ney Chan­nel alum turned head­line-grab­bing wild child, makeup/​lingerie mag­nate, award-win­ning porn direc­tor, and, to vary­ing extents, unknow­able enig­ma – is an expres­sion­is­tic Nico­las Cage-type tal­ent in need of a con­fi­dent direc­tor to cor­rect­ly deploy her unique pres­ence or just a plain ol’ bad actor will not be resolved by Chad Faust’s revenge thriller Girl. Though if the film can be count­ed as evi­dence one way or the oth­er, it would have to be for the lat­ter theory.

As the sep­tum-ringed aveng­ing angel cred­it­ed only as ​‘Girl,’ intro­duced on a bus tak­ing her back home to rur­al Sad­nessville from nowhere, her char­ac­ter con­sists of broad strokes and hand-wav­ing gen­er­al­i­ties. Her flinty dri­ve to even the score with her abu­sive father con­sti­tutes the only trait by which a view­er might define her, stand­ing out from the morose grunts and with­drawn skulk­ing that feel less like a per­for­mance and more like its absence.

A dialled-in thes­pi­an would antic­i­pate and account for this thin­ness by ren­der­ing their sin­gle moti­va­tion as a sim­plic­i­ty in line with myth, as Cage him­self did in the Beowul­fi­an warpath head trip Mandy. In Thorne’s case, she takes the path of least resis­tance in each scene save a blowup late in the sec­ond act, instead leav­ing Girl to be pre­cise­ly that – anoth­er anony­mous per­son­age drift­ing through an over­played genre, with lit­tle to dis­tin­guish her.

She’s cheat­ed of her bloody sat­is­fac­tion when she dis­cov­ers her dad’s corpse hang­ing in the garage, per­haps the hand­i­work of the fore­bod­ing local sher­iff (Mick­ey Rourke, one realis­es in hor­ror upon squint­ing) or a laun­dro­mat charmer named Charmer (writer-direc­tor Faust), or as it turns out, both. They’re all cahoot­ed up in a scheme ori­ent­ed around a twist end­ing of betray­al between bare­ly-there char­ac­ters we can­not pos­si­bly be expect­ed to care about, nor its vague high­er mes­sage con­cern­ing the evil that fam­i­lies do.

In a film with shod­dy char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, pedes­tri­an act­ing, and dia­logue that unwit­ting­ly imag­ines the Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy video game adap­ta­tion, a cap­tive view­er has no choice but to pin their hopes on an intrin­sic camp-adja­cent plea­sure in the even­tu­al sight of a hatch­et-wield­ing Thorne doing bat­tle with Mick­ey Rourke. While far and away the most divert­ing pas­sage of this po-faced slog through a mis­er­able pock­et of Mid­dle Amer­i­ca, it arrives far too late and ends far too soon.

There’s no hint of irony or self-aware­ness to Faust’s reliance on well-worn stereo­types of meth coun­try, only an accep­tance of all bleak­ness at face val­ue. For Thorne, this tonal dirge exerts a rein­ing-in effect, her usu­al­ly unpre­dictable act­ing style sub­dued in a reg­is­ter that sim­u­lates the illu­sion of restraint. But as soon as she loosens her repres­sion and lets out the tem­pest rag­ing with­in her near the mis­shapen cli­max, any notion of new­ly devel­oped con­trol falls away with the return of her sig­na­ture hap­haz­ard technique.

The point at which she throws cau­tion to the wind gen­er­al­ly rep­re­sents the high point of a Bel­la Thorne vehi­cle, drab films pro­duced on the cheap and sold to the built-in audi­ence of her fan­base. She takes a nov­el tack to the task of read­ing words, drop­ping emphases at strange beats in a sen­tence to make a volatile be-bop of the Eng­lish lan­guage, but Faust’s lead­en cre­ative hand tamps down that spark.

Thorne’s capa­ble of more than this, even if the ques­tion of how much more remains unre­solved. For an actress pos­sessed of such raw undis­ci­plined ener­gy, the one thing view­ers could count on is that there’ll nev­er be a dull moment so long as she’s onscreen. In this low val­ley of a less-than-dis­tin­guished fil­mog­ra­phy, not even that can be tak­en for granted.