The Moth Diaries (2012)

(aka OMG! She's my friend, not yours!)
Release Date: On VOD now; In Theaters 4/20.
Written by: Rachel Klein (Novel.)
Directed by: Mary Harron.
Starring: Sarah Bolger, Lily Cole, Sarah Gadon, and Scott Speedman.

When I first heard of this movie, I thought to myself, "It's probably about some killer moths." That confused me though, because how do killer moths keep a diary? Then I saw the poster and was like "Maybe the moths are like a metaphor for a schoolgirl's blossoming sexuality." Again I was confused, because is the movie about a sex diary?

Overall, I guess I was just confused.

Apparently, she's confused too.

The Moth Diaries is the story of Rebecca, a sixteen-year-old Schoolgirl who has some intense feelings of "friendship" for her roommate, sixteen-year-old Lucie. When a creepy walking tree named Ernessa arrives at school, Rebecca becomes all kinds of jealous that Lucie is all about the new girl, and not her anymore. She decides to keep a diary about it. Oddly enough, the diary kinda doesn't have anything to do with the movie, unless the whole movie is the diary, then who cares.

"Let's pretend we're moths, and scissor-kiss."

Rebecca is just sure there's something odd about this lanky new girl who looks like a goth version of E.T., but she can't prove it. She comes to find that Ernessa is a Vampire -who isn't a Vampire these days- and she's trying to steal Lucie's soul or something (by having sex with her?) No one believes her, and everyone thinks shes paranoid.  Not even her creeper Teacher is on her side, and he really spends a lot of the movie trying to smooth up in her.

"I wanna put my poetry in you..."

What we have here is another movie about angst-ridden Teenagers who act shitty to one another and mope around, because they aren't the center of someone's attention. I don't know if the novel that the movie is based on was any good or not, but the movie just ends up being kind of pointless. It's well made, pretty to look at, and the actors do a decent job, but unless you're 12 and the biggest issue in your life is being possessive and/or obsessive about someone, this movie may not do too much to satisfy you.

This picture is a good analogy for the whole movie.

The movie was heavy with lesbian undertones too. Granted, there's a girl-girl sex scene in the movie, but the main character never goes full-on gay for her friend, rather she just spends a ton of time gazing longingly at her, and really, really, "valuing their friendship." Mary Harron could have laid that issue out in the open and done something with it; at least then the movie would have felt like it had a purpose. This is the woman who gave us American Psycho for crying out loud... she knows how to translate books to film!

The lesbian choke-out scene?

There was just too much here that just didn't make sense; Ernessa spends the whole movie urging Rebecca to kill herself, but why? If you're a Vampire, why not just kill her yourself? You killed just about everyone else around you... and for that matter, what was all of the alluding about the two of them being so similar? If she's a Vampire, she's a very different kind of bloodsucker. Ernessa felt more like she was a vengeful ghost, if anything at all... It just felt as if a lot of the story was missing.

There will be rain! And blood! And confusion.

Look, this isn't a terrible effort, it's just too disjointed to be considered a good one. Too much of the film focused on the Teen Angst aspect of things, and it never went to the places that it teased us that it might. The Moth Diaries is worth a look-see, especially for the younger crowd, but most Horror fans will be left unimpressed with it, I'm afraid.

C

As creepy as it may seem to most normal folk, this movie was a Schoolgirl lover's dream. Then again we're Horror fans, and we're creepy to begin with, right? Now that all of that's been established, here are the Schoolgirls of The Moth Diaries. The main three, anyway.