Trust

September 10, 2011

"Trust" is another very serious movie that is currently being exclusively shown only in Ayala Cinemas. While the topic is relevant and timely, this is most definitely not an easy movie to watch. There are parts of this movie that are too disturbing to even describe in words, what more about seeing these scenes unfold on the screen. 

The center of this movie is 14 year old Annie (played so devastatingly spot-on by Liana Liberato, who is the same age as Annie). Her online affair with a certain Charlie turns from a cute innocent crush into a horrific nightmare when he turns out to be 35 year-old pervert. Being a father myself, I could not bear watching the horrors of a teenage child being seduced by a merciless sexual predator from an online chat room into grim reality. Those are really some of the scariest scenes I have seen so realistically depicted in a movie.

The rest of the movie dealt with the reaction of Annie's parents, particularly the father Will (played again with such tragedy by sad-eyed Clive Owen). He wants to help his daughter the best that he knew how, but he cannot understand why she was very much against what he was doing. As a parent, I also had a hard time understanding Annie's bizarre behavior after the seduction. However, the director David Schwimmer (yes, of "Friends"!) deftly guides us through Annie's traumatic ordeal, her denial, her rebellion, her humiliation, her resignation, her awakening. We could actually understand how this teenager thinks, and that is an achievement.

The extra "home movie" scene about who the real "Charlie" paints another cruel reality about these pedophile perverts. These guys are not the creepy loners who spend their miserable lives hooked on the internet, as you might imagine. These last five minutes of the film drives home a message of how impossible it is to identify a pedophile from among the ordinary men on the street. And that, unfortunately, is the sad truth.