Abigail and Jeremy run lines, their heads haloed with light against the black. We've listed a number of streaming and cable services - including rental, purchase, and subscription options - along with the availability of 'Blame' on each platform. The only time I was reminded that a teenager wrote the script was in the scenes between Jeremy and his girlfriend. He stumbles into a situation with a girl who he believes he may love. This triggers a chain of events that will come to affect everyone around them, as well as reveal some dark truths. His girlfriend thinks he's a loser and Abigail looks at him with devotion. I was watching him, registering the way he looked at me.
Messina has a difficult role to play here. The point is in showing us how these teenagers interact with each other, giving them more difficult roles and relations than these movies often do, and then throwing this conflict on top of it. This movie is fantastic and so supremely clever. But when Abigail is made the lead of their rendition of The Crucible—Melissa is her understudy—and gets to spend lots of one-on-one time with their new drama teacher , that escalates matters. Shephard gets good performances out of her cast—and it helps that the teenage characters are played by actors who are relatively close to teenagerhood. But the journey of writing the film, scrapping drafts and reworking them for years, unaware where I would end up, was arguably much more powerful.
Advertisement None of this is news, necessarily, but Shephard attacks the topic in creative ways, allowing for ambiguity, complexity, theatricality. She shows up for school in prim black dresses with white collars, and a huge cross necklace. It's a combination he finds irresistible. When I was twelve, standing alone in a home depot, I felt it for the first time. Chris Messina stars as a substitute drama teacher whose taboo relationship with an unstable student Quinn Shephard strikes a nerve in her jealous classmate Nadia Alexander , sparking a vengeful chain of events within their suburban high school that draws parallels to Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible'.
I can wear the same clothes on the subway that I did as a teenager, and yet I receive a small fraction of the advances. A man staring at me, his wife a few paces behind. Interested in knowing what the movie's about? Abigail Quinn Shephard is an outcast who seeks solace in the worlds of the characters she reads about, much to the amusement of her manipulative classmate, Melissa Nadia Alexander. Playing Abigail made me feel sexy, powerful. I didn't expect this to be a story full of twists and turns, but as a high-school adaptation of The Crucible, it's perfectly fitting. Most days, I am treated as such. I love a good high-school movie, and Blame just might be a great one.
Is she trying to be Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie? As I begin the next chapter of my life and my career , I hope to continue to tell stories that teach me as I develop them. It was the same way I would feel at fifteen, being kept after class each day by a teacher who used to stare at my legs when I wore short skirts. Advertisement Abigail reenters high school after six months in a psych ward. Her fellow students, also being in high school, are very mean to her. Melissa, fueled by vengeful jealousy, begins to spiral out of control and concocts a plot against Abigail. On the surface, she's a shy wallflower, but there's something underneath. Alexander gets to play the evil girl, and seems to be reveling in every minute of it.
Glass animals line the window sills. Celeste Montalvo designed the costumes, and her excellent work is a huge contribution to the film. Messina, as the drama teacher, is amiable but not a ton more. I had a crush on my teacher, who would openly flirt with me in front of my friends and who frequently crossed boundaries always stopping just short of anything reportable. Recommendation: Want to see a modern-day, high school version of The Crucible? The highlights come from the teenage girls, which makes sense given by whom the movie is being made.
But the way it captures how these characters think and act toward each other? It seems that whatever halo surrounded me as a child has faded now. He was always the one who had the power. With the perspective of adulthood, such battles seem silly, but in the thick of high school, it's life or death. Messina does not play Jeremy as a predator, although the character's actions clearly cross all kinds of lines. I perceived myself as sexually mature, even if I was completely inexperienced.
She wrote the screenplay—the original draft, anyway—while in high school, which is why the characters and the dialogue feel authentic. They don't even know they can opt out. They are thrown into competition with each other. It is a movie that feels almost too relevant right now, being a narrative that deals directly in more ways than one with sexual abuse, as well as abuse of power. Of course, I had no way of predicting the current reckoning that is cleansing Hollywood — but in some ways it feels as if the timing was fated.
It offered a rare respite from the age of whispered crushes, Facebook snubbing, lunchroom gossip. I, like most teenagers, lacked the ability to see my own naiveté and vulnerability. As both a directorial and writing debut, this is a wild success, and to have it helmed by a strong performance from the director, writer, producer, and songwriter herself? Its characters feel authentic, the dialogue sounds real, and the cattiness and pettiness and mean-spirited nature of its characters ring true. Their relationships are so good, and the way they evolve is even better. Jeremy is an immature, passive man, and touched by Abigail's intensity as an actress. Abigail's transformation has an effect on the other girls, whose own wardrobes get more outrageous to compete with hers. She walks through the hallways in her anachronistic clothes like an apparition.