PopSyndicate.com

A young girl starts a new life only to discover she will belong to the dark side after her 18th birthday.

The film starts out with a young girl meeting up with her boyfriend and getting an early birthday gift. Just as she’s opening the present, her father storms in and drags her off. As she screams, her dad swerves all over the road while muttering to himself and clutching a Bible. He says he can’t let her make it to her 18th birthday and the two crash but are unhurt….until the big semi crashes into the Ford. As she dies slowly, her father takes a jagged piece of mirror glass to finish the job.

Then we see a young girl, Molly (Haley Bennett), getting ready for her first day at a new school. Her father (Jake Weber) talks about making a “fresh start” for both of them and we learn something is going on with her mother. Later we find out her mom is in a mental institution after trying to stab her.

Molly goes to class and the popular boy, Joseph (Chance Crawford), begins checking her out…right in front of his girlfriend (AnnaLynn McCord). She makes friends with the school outcasts: one who is a Christian and trying to convert others and the other who is a stereotypical rebel. Naturally there are complications when Joseph takes an interest in Molly.

From there it’s hard to decipher where the film is going. We get hints something isn’t right with Molly when she begins freaking out in English class (which is apparently the only class she takes since that’s all we see. Conveniently all the schoolmates of hers we meet just happen to be in that class). Then she gets nose bleeds when she touches a Bible in English class and starts having panic attacks.

I kept wondering what the connection was to the first girl who was killed in the beginning of the movie.

Finally they get around to telling you that her parents made a deal with some demon women in a public toilet when she was a baby. No, you read that right. Apparently, her mother went into labor in the women’s toilet and her dad was around to help, yet the baby died. The evil woman walked in then and offered them a choice that the baby would live if, when she turned 18, she’d then belong to the dark side. So the parents accepted and that’s the reason for her mom trying to kill her before she reaches 18. Her father, however, doesn’t believe anythings really going to happen.

The mother escapes and tries to kill Molly but winds up falling and landing on her own knife. Molly reaches out to the Christian girl who baptizes her.  But then she apparently changes her mind and attempts to drown Molly. A fight ensues and the Christian girl drowns. Molly then turns to Joseph and the school counselor for help, but we learn they are both in on the dark side pact. In fact the counselor was the woman in the bathroom the day she was born.

The film was going along okay, but then the ending was confusing. It made no sense. Molly appears to try and avoid being turned over to a life of evil by stabbing herself at least twice in the heart. However, then we see her dad’s in an asylum and she’s valedictorian and winking at Joseph and smiling at the evil woman who got her parents into this mess. Huh? So she didn’t die and turned to the dark side? And her dad’s been institutionalized why? Also, at the graduation we see missing person fliers up of the Christian girl, which is odd since Molly left her in the baptismal pool. Are we to assume she dissolved?  None of this made sense. If they were going for some strange twist at the end then they missed it. Twists have to have a purpose and this did not.  The beginning of the film had faults you could look past but the ending just didn’t work.

3