Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Bel Powley, Alexander Skarsgård, Kristen Wiig, Christopher Meloni, Margarita Levieva, Madeline Waters, Abby Wait, Quinn Nagle, Austin Lyon, Miranda Bailey, Giovanni Miller, Samantha Hyde, David Fine, Natalie Stephany Aguilar, Drew Benda, Davy Clements, Robert Cure, Abby Wait.

There are some films that get released that you can’t help but admire the spirit in which they were released, the sheer striking sense of inadequacy that they impose on the thought processes and the feeling of the damaging voyeuristic intent in which they serve up the drama.

That sense of depth being plummeted, of the moment of being caught reading someone else’s diaries is captured frame by frame in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and the message of freedom of experimentation and damnation that blossoms throughout. It is not just voyeuristic, it is almost cannibalistic, the stripping of the soul, devouring every morsel in which Bel Powley’s Minnie is transformed over the period of the film from inquisitive school girl to party animal, from almost gentle like being to caged tiger whose life spirals out of control and the sexual freedom she awakens eating away her flesh and her very being.

For half the population the film might even feel as though it is verging on the display of wanton abandon, of not understanding the very heightened sense of emotional blackmail that can go on between a young woman’s heart and the hormones that go out of control when roused and stimulated beyond that which is socially acceptable and the laws that are stretched and broken in the pursuit of hedonism and the out of control.

To play such a part takes true dedication and in Bel Powley that intense reasoning, the hedonism and pleasure seeking is in itself an art and whilst it may provide uncomfortable viewing for some, the redemption of spirit is a metamorphic wonder. The awkward, the tricky juxtaposition between art and voyeur is handled well and Bel Powley takes the cinema goer to the very edge of what could be deemed erring on the very uneasy but pulls back enough to not want to seek solace at looking away or down at the floor when the realisation of what her life has become starts to hit home.

With excellent support from Alexander Skarsgård as the object of her obsession Monroe and a decent portrayal of how far friendships can be taken by Madeleine Waters as Kimmie, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is required viewing, one in which the point of the uncomfortable is but a precursor for the truth behind understanding.

Ian D. Hall