Despite post-coital bliss, Veronica is angry at Heather after their falling out—Heather calls her “a Girl Scout cookie,” among other things—so Veronica remarks to JD that she wants her dead. The problem is that JD is an atypical misanthrope, so when they’re joking in the kitchen about how to get Heather to puke from a hangover cure, JD suggests a bottle of drain cleaner. Veronica instead concocts a cocktail of orange juice and milk, but then grabs the wrong bottle, a mistake that JD does not bother to point out. The mixture kills Heather, and Veronica and JD fake a suicide note. All of a sudden, suicide becomes the latest high school fad.

Lehmann and his screenwriter Daniel Waters may ostensibly focus on death, yet Heathers is at its most biting when it explores other hot-button issues in a casual way. There is an early scene where Veronica and the Heathers are in the bathroom, and Veronica gladly assists in a lesser Heather’s bulimia (she flexes her index finger and quips, “A true friend’s work is never done”). The dialogue initially suggests Lehmann and Waters are mocking her suffering, as if they think eating disorders are hilarious, yet the light-hearted tone has its purpose: The lesser Heather starts eating once the alpha dies, a development that carefully pinpoints the terrible costs of long-term emotional abuse.

Heathers also offers a sophisticated take on teen drinking and sexual assault. Three men attempt to rape Veronica at various points: JD, a drunk college loser, and a drunk high-school jock. The latter two scenes are downright disturbing. Veronica gets away with her self-esteem and body intact, but on both occasions she’s on a double date with two different Heathers, who aren’t so lucky. At the college party, the alpha Heather is pressured into performing oral sex on a college-age predator; her subsequent look of self-loathing in the mirror is brutal.

That scene is an early preview of what happens with the drunk jock: After Veronica rebuffs him, the third Heather is raped by his best friend. The take lasts several minutes, with Heather and her assailant struggling in a field. The scene ends with JD rescuing Veronica from the situation, yet the painful joke is what happens in the background: Veronica has a cute relationship-building moment, while her friend becomes a sexual assault victim. If Lehmann shot the scene with deep focus, it would have been an early precursor to 12 Years a Slave’s use of long takes to demonstrate a culture’s cruel banality. Instead, Heather and her assailant flail in the distance and the camera dares us not to care.

With its sneaky subversiveness and disgust for its characters, Heathers is more ambitious than most high-school comedies. Clueless and Mean Girls focus on the social hierarchy, yet they’re merely coming-of-age tales that affirm the community: Alicia Silverstone’s Cher joins a cadre of women who look forward to long-term commitment, and Lindsay Lohan’s Cady finally declares that she’s normal. Veronica may save the school, but she’s also a self-loathing masochist–at one point, she burns herself with a cigarette later as a means of contrition. More importantly, she’s complicit in the suicide of her ex-boyfriend, and she rejects the social ladder altogether. The only modern high-school comedy that approaches a similarly bleak outcome is Alexander Payne’s Election, and even then the students emerge relatively unscathed.