Tagline:
Purity has a price.

Wide Release Date:
February 20, 2018

Directed by:
Danishka Esterhazy
Written by:
Danishka Esterhazy
Produced by:
Stephanie Chapelle, Michael McNamara

Starring:
Katie Douglas
Celina Martin
Peter Outerbridge
Sara Canning

PREGAME THOUGHTS

Honestly, no real thoughts here. My 7-year-old daughter couldn’t sleep on a Saturday night and was hanging out with me on the couch, so I picked something that looked interesting enough for me that was also about girls. I guess it’s not for kids, but she got bored about ten minutes in anyway. Turns out it’s a movie about farming teenage girls for their skin, so maybe she was better off not learning about this shit until she was at least…seven and a half.

THE 600(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Welcome to a boarding school circa whenever. Groups of girls live on sixteen floors, graduating to new levels as they get older. Things are suspicious right away: the “academy” is run by a woman named Miss Brixil (Sara Canning), the girls are under constant surveillance and treated with miltary strictness. They are taught to stick to feminine virtues of cleanliness and obedience or else they get punished with isolation. They don’t even know how to read, man. These kids ain’t learnin’ nuthin’. They are all told that they are getting groomed for adoption, so straighten up and fly right or else you’ll never get picked up by Mr. and Mrs. Fauntleroy Chanel Aston Martin.

Big Brother is always watching you. Do something funny! Do a cartwheel!

Main girl Vivien (Katie Douglas), and fellow “classmates”, gets bumped up to Level 16 where she reunites with old friend Sophia (Celina Martin). Sophia knows the ropes of Level 16 and advises Vivien to never swallow the vitamins they are given as they are actually sedatives. The first night, Vivien (pretending to be fast asleep) gets carried off by a big tough Rowdy Roddy Piper-looking Russian guard (along with a another girl) to be viewed and inspected by “prospective parents”. They’re keen on Vivien, and they follow Miss Brixil to discuss “purchasing” her. The girls are then carried back. Later, when talking to Sophia, Vivien learns that one of the guards has appeared to be inappropriately touching the girls. So this place is fun all around.

Apparently there’s a fever going around the boarding school! And the only prescription is… more vitamins! In the form of “vaccines” that cause rashes and seizures! Whoops! Dr. Miro (Peter Outerbridge) is the facility’s doctor and he looks a bit like Martin Mull as Gene Parmesan. Miro is nice to Vivien until he infers that Vivien isn’t taking her vitamins, so he dopes her up with a shot of condensed vitamins. Uber sedatives. She gets loopy for a bit, but then regains composure by the next night. Sophia knows that the one guard, Alex, has been touching the girls. Next time they catch him coming in the room alone while pretending to asleep, they’ll attack the guy and steal his keycard. Yeah. Teenagers fighting a buff Russian dude. Good luck.

The plan has a hitch: One of the other girls, Ava (Alexis Whelan), suspicious of Vivien’s behavior, reports her to the authorities. Vivien gets locked up for the night in solitary confinement. It’s up to Sophia to do it alone! And she almost does! But then she is caught before she can rescue Vivien, so then she gets locked up. Ugh. Girls, am I right?

The missing keycard is a big fucking deal. Miss Brixil and Dr. Miro line all the Level 16 girls up and holler at ’em. A girl named Rita (Amalia Williamson) is forced out of the room for punishment, and until the card turns up, it’ll be one girl per day. That night, Vivien finds the keycard behind her bed, busts out of the room, busts out Sophia, and they both discover a creepy operating room full of creepy bags that presumably have creepy corpses. One of the corpses is Rita with her face removed. They then discover a video in a lounge that reveals their “boarding school” to actually be a farm for skin rejuvenation transplant victims. Hilarity ensues!

Yum! Dinner’s ready!

Let’s wrap this sucker up. They try to warn the other girls. They capture Miss Brixil and force her to confess. Miss Brixil herself underwent the skin rejuvenation transplant. They all run away. Vivien and Sophia escape to a locked shed. Dr. Miro tries to coax them out, but Viven thwarts him by slicing up her own face with a razor making Miro go “noooo! arrrrgh! noooo!” and then he’s in trouble with the government and he gets shot. The girls get rescued by the local police and every goes and gets ice cream.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — General Movie Thoughts

I enjoyed this movie more than I expected to. More than I should’ve, too. I recognize that the story was a little thin, the plot wasn’t that original, nor was the acting great, but it was a fun little story that was oddly compelling. At first it gave me TV movie vibes, but that’s because every single actor here is some who-cares Canadian. Right? Nothing says “TV movie vibes” like filthy, filthy Canadians!

Note: The views presented by Tom do not necessarily reflect the views of TomWritesAboutStuff, its parent company, its subsidiary companies, and Tom himself even though he just wrote them down.

Owwww, ahhhh, waahhhh, this is what being Canadian feels like, waaaahhh!!

The case against the movie is damning, honestly. It feels like a stretched-out episode of The Twilight Zone or a very subpar Black Mirror. Hell, you can even make a throwaway X-Files episode out of this premise. These girls have been raised in this hellhole since infancy. They have never seen sunlight, they don’t know how to read, they don’t have families, they don’t make contact with the outside world, and they don’t seem to engage in any stimulating activities whatsoever. Yet, they do seem to have the ability to understand that there isn’t something right about the little world they live in, and Vivien later understands that the place is nothing but a farm to raise young girls for their faces without any context about how the outside world really works. Maybe this is how every boarding school on Earth operates! Maybe it’s just a rite of passage, you know, losing your face. How the fuck would they know literally anything? These girls are probably not even allowed to take a shit. I guess my bottom line here is that it takes a huge suspension of disbelief to accept the premise at face value without nitpicking details and questioning the inner workings of the world outside of the context of the story itself.

Hmm… thhis is one looks juicy and fresh. Does she come with a side salad?

That all being said, I did accept the premise at face value and I didn’t hate the movie. Also, I’ve seen and enjoyed enough episodes of fantasy/sci-fi TV in my lifetime that my tolerance threshold is pretty high. I readily ate this shit up anyway.

TOPIC 2 — Plot Holes

Yeah, ok, maybe I will nitpick a little bit here! I’ll even reiterate some points because I’m just so dang curious about them.

• The girls can’t read or write, but they talk casually like high schoolers to one another. In such a dystopian, helpless setting, presumably raised from birth (?), wouldn’t their speech be completely childlike? They do hint at this a few times, when Grace smiles meekly and asks what word is on her dress, or when one other girl jubilates that the vitamin they’re getting that day is blue. It seems like this is how most of their conversation would be, trained to not bitch or complain or have negative thoughts?

• Raised from birth? Raised from toddler age? Were these girls abandoned in front of fire stations? How were Dr. Miro and Miss Brixil able to just scoop up these girls for their purposes? Are these Russian girls that the Russian government are turning a blind eye toward? Why don’t they have Russian accents? Are they speaking Russian and it’s just translated to English for movie purposes? What about Sophia? She’s Asian! None of this makes sense!

IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE! RAWR!

• There are cameras everywhere, and it’s directly shown that these girls are constantly being watched, but why doesn’t it amount to much? Vivien and Sophia are constantly running around the halls like squawking chickens and yet not one person is shown in some sort of surveillance room keeping an eye on anything. ESEPCIALLY in their dormitory? The one place you’d expect to have fucking cameras? Is it just assumed that they’ll be nice little girls and take their sleep pills, because throughout the movie we see Vivien and Sophia running around their dorm like squawking chickens when they should be knocked out cold. Put a fucking camcorder on a tripod in the room or something.

• What kind of punishments were the girls actually afraid of? These girls were literally getting farmed for their faces, so Miro and Brixil couldn’t be able to lay a hand on them. That leaves solitary confinement? Fat chance, idiots. If it were me and they placed me in a stinkin’ cage, you’d better believe I’d be rapping my skull against the bars like I was trying to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” without my hands. There’s literally no punishment these girls would actually have to realistically endure. Someone take away their Nintendo!

There are others, but I’m hella bored now.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

All of the girls are named after classic Hollywood actresses: Vivien (Leigh), Sophia (Loren), Ava (Gardner), Rita (Hayworth), Olivia (de Havilland), Clara (Bow), Hedy (Lamarr), Audrey (Hepburn), Grace (Kelly), Veronica (Lake), Greta (Garbo), May/Mae (West), and Natalie (Wood)
Ok, fine, this isn’t bad trivia at all. I don’t even know what to make fun of. I would’ve preferred a few more, I guess, like Lauren (Bacall) and Pauly (Shore).

Other than the title there are no opening credits.
Yeah, I suppose this is what passes for trivia on a shitty Netflix original movie that no one watched but me. Perhaps the movie’s budget didn’t allow funding for opening credits! That would certainly be a Thing.

Though it is not be explicitly shown or stated, it is likely that Miss Brixil is is also the woman in the videos during some lessons. Both women have platinum hair, similar clothing style, and signature red lips.
SIGNATURE RED LIPS. That’s what I want on my gravestone.

Check out those signature red lips in action!

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

Nah. It felt like an extra-long X-Files episode, which isn’t terrible criticism, but at least with X-Files you get a screen full of sexy-ass Fox Mulder. I liked this movie enough, but you won’t. Don’t even bother!