"Who are you?" Jeff asks the girl he's brought home. He's a photographer; she's somebody he picked up at a coffee shop, after chatting with her on the Internet for three weeks. She's also fourteen years old.

Jeff asks exactly what I'm thinking, and I wish he hadn't. I want to like Hayley. She's smart. She doesn't take anyone's crap. She's fourteen years old. I don't mind that she drugged Jeff's drink: that was self-defense. When she tied him to a table, that was karma. And when she got out the ice pack and the surgical gloves, well....

"I'm every girl you ever looked at," answers Hayley, in exactly the way I feared she would. "Every girl you ever touched. Killed." But with this speech, she stops being a girl altogether; she becomes an archetype, a house of ideas with hazel windows. Then I realize that I've been approaching Hayley all wrong. It doesn't matter if I like her or not. What matters is that I see and hear her without being distracted by the person--the little girl--she is.

In fact, sometimes Hayley and Jeff don't even act like people at all. They talk to each other in speeches, like characters in a Euripidean play. They each attack with ideas. Hayley sneers at the excuses people like Jeff make ("Oh, but she's so mature!"), and Jeff says he's just an outlet for Hayley's anger at her family ("Do I remind you of your father?"). It's a strangely philosophical take on what, for most of us, is a black-and-white issue.

That's not to say Hard Candy is an emotionally sterile film. The movie is structured so tightly that we must care about the people involved. There are only five characters in the entire cast, and three of them take up about five minutes of screen time altogether. Jeff and Hayley are the film, and there's no escape from them. Lead actors Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page remind us constantly what's at stake; they go places that are so raw and terrifying that we can only follow, even if we don't want to. Nineteen-year-old Page infuses Hayley with intelligence and innocence, and does it so well that I'm not sure if the innocence is real or another part of Hayley's act.

Who are you?

As emotionally powerful as the movie is, Hard Candy never lets us use our emotions to decide what's right or wrong--and that's what makes it so uncomfortable for us. Most of us live in a place where pedophiles are always wrong; where "Dude! She's in middle school!" is a valid argument. But in Jeff's apartment, our moral shortcuts don't work. Hayley may be a child, but she's just as much of a predator as Jeff is. She knew when his neighbors would be gone, and no one takes her dad's medical textbook and surgery tools just to meet somebody.

But Hayley isn't the bad guy, and Jeff isn't the good one. Hard Candy exposes "good" and "bad" for what they are: boxes we put moral dilemmas in so we don't have to think about them. With our cheat sheet gone, we're forced to think about pedophilia--really think about it, not just squash it with "But she's fourteen!"--and that's what makes the movie's subject matter so disturbing.

Hard Candy isn't the sort of movie you enjoy. Watching it is painful, disgusting, disorienting, and makes you want a shower afterwards. But it tears down moral constructs that most Hollywood movies (and most of us) thrive on. It forces us to scrutinize the inscrutable. That process is difficult, but it's important.