Crush (2013)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2022) You could retitle Crush as “Tweenager’s first stalker thriller” and you wouldn’t be too far off the mark: recasting some very familiar tropes in a high-school context, it makes about as much sense as the Fatal Attraction-inspired films of previous decades. In the aspirational tradition of high-school films, the actors not only look thirty, but they act in ways that would be far more appropriate to post-college young people. Yet so it goes! Our protagonist is a popular soccer jock (but artistically sensitive!) who figures out that there’s a violent stalker in his life when anyone who shows a bit of romantic or flirting interest in him gets attacked. (It’s not much of a mystery when Crush’s DVD cover features the stalker, but who looks at DVD covers these days?)  The plotting is absurd if you don’t buy into the film’s cartoonish stalker character, but then again this is a film about genre thrills, not neo-realistic drama among high school kids. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from a violent teenage thriller – not good, not subtle, but forthright about its low ambitions and executed by director Malik Bader with a certain degree of formal professionalism, even despite a nonsensical script. Leigh Whannell (otherwise famous as a horror writer-director) shows up briefly in a secondary role. Everyone else in the cast is cute, interchangeable and disposable. Crush will only be successful among undemanding audiences – everyone else has already seen most of it before even starting to watch.