8 /10

Warning: Spoilers

I'm about to spill most of the beans here so if you don't want to know what happens, read no farther. Jody Foster is Rynn, the little girl who lives down the lane in a spotless, New England cottage, with her reclusive poet father. Or so it seems. When a nosy landlady, Alexis Smith, looking mighty good, shows up and begins making pointed inquiries about dear old Dad, Foster allows a heavy trap door to bonk her on the head and put a permanent end to her queries. The body remains in the cellar, aging along with the wine and Foster's mother.



There is, of course, no father upstairs sleeping, or working behind his locked bedroom door, or off somewhere tending to some affair. After home schooling his keen-minded little girl, he advises her never to allow others to dictate her decisions. Thereafter, he wades off into the surf, leaving behind a payment of three years' rent on the house and a sizable sum of cash for his daughter to dip into.



But Jody Foster is too clever by half. She's got the brains and the cultivation of an adult. (We can tell because she loves Chopin and knows how to preserve dead bodies after poisoning them). But she has an emotional configuration that befits her shapely thirteen-year-old body. I mean, what the hell is she going to do when the rent is up, when the cash runs out? A little more substance in the frontal lobe wouldn't hurt.



Martin Sheen, as Alexis Smith's son, could, I suppose, be categorized as the bad guy. He's had a slight run-in with the law over an encounter with a pre-teen earlier, but he is not a pedophiliac. There isn't a single scene showing him worshiping a foot. However we do see him torture Foster's gerbil with a lighted cigarette and then fling the tiny beast into the fireplace. He hits on Foster, and he says to the teen-aged boy whom Foster has befriended and confided in, Scott Jacoby as Mario Miglioriti, "Hit the road, Wop." Sheen discovers Foster's secret but the audience is likely to feel little sorrow at his passing as he finishes the cup of tea she's prepared for him and comments, "Tastes like almonds." I hope nobody gets this movie mixed up with a schlock fest like "The Last House on the Left." No blood here. No screams. Just the rather slow unfolding of a tense story with, I have to say, a flimsy premise. You can't get very far with a story of a young girl who wants to be left alone and murders people who ask too many questions.



In the end, though, we must ask how many bodies can that wine cellar hold? There are other weaknesses in the script too. Her dear mother's body has been lying in the cellar for a month or so and when Mario asks about decomposition, Foster says, "You can put stuff on them. I read about it in the library." Well, the thing about preserving bodies has to do with putting something IN them, not just ON them. You don't have to be a mortician to know that. Any good taxidermist will fill you in.



The performances, on the other hand, are all good. (They pretty much have to be. Almost everything takes place in one room.) A lot of the film's weight rests on the shoulders of Jody Foster. How is she? She's amazing. She was about twelve when this was shot (the same age as Lolita) and she never puts a foot wrong. Every line is believable. On top of that, she may only be in her teens, but she's criminally beautifully, and sexy too, enough to bring out the latent molester in any normal man. She's the kind of adolescent you'd like to dandle on your knee and subtly caress while discussing Nietzsche with her. Sorry, but that surely must have been something the film makers realized. Her ash blond hair is long and wavy and she wears bangs low across her forehead, turning her eyes a deeper blue. Her features are slightly fuller than they were to become, and she has a gap between her upper incisors that produces a slight whistle when she utters sibilants. She's endearing, brain and body both. Some kids seem to be born with the talent to lie well, as an actress and as a character. Foster's got it