Xan Brooks 

The Ketchup Effect (Hip Hip Hora!)

Xan Brooks: The gloomy flipside of the rites-of-passage teen genre
  
  

The Ketchup Effect
Into the sewer: The Ketchup Effect Photograph: Public domain

Trust a Swede to show us the gloomy flipside of the rites-of-passage teen genre. Like Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love, this paints adolescence as a dark age of casual cruelty and ritual humiliation; a land ruled over by perkily gelled despots and spoilt princesses who dream of becoming models.

Writer-director Teresa Fabik has her hand full with a mixed bag of acting talent but coaxes a fine performance from Amanda Renberg as the martyred Sofie, who passes out at a party and is manhandled into a series of sexual poses by the loutish kid she has a crush on. When the resulting photos are passed around in the schoolyard, Sofie's golden life swings into the sewer. She is disowned by her friends, berated by her father and ignored by her teachers.

At the end of this compelling, dispiriting experience, Fabik conspires to magic up an uplifting little finale. It feels like a plaster slapped over the top of an open sore.

 

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