Simply put, “Hard Candy” is a movie about a 14-year-old girl, Hayley (Ellen Page), and a 32-year-old man, Jeff (Patrick Wilson), who plan to meet after an Internet chat. The movie takes place within a period of less than a day and the events seem to be taken in a single shot.

The movie has a surprising twist of events as it proclaims to have in its trailers. The opening shot is a computer screen where Hayley and Jeff chat as lensman319 and thonggrrrrl14 and decide to meet at Jeff’s favorite coffee shop. When they meet, Jeff, with his clean suit and full rim glasses, does not look like someone who would hook up with girls over Internet. Hayley, with her innocent baby face, does not look that way either. But when Jeff brushes the chocolate cake clean off Hayley’s lips with his thumb and eats it, the audience realizes that he knows his way with girls. The switch in focus between Hayley and a “Missing” photo on a bulletin board heightens the dramatic tension.

The two decide to move to Jeff’s house — a spooky, remote place. He apparently lives all alone as a photographer and his models’ pictures line the walls. Jeff and Hayley talk about his work and the number of models he has slept with while he makes her a drink. She refuses his offer, saying, “You shouldn’t drink what you didn’t make.” She makes her own, handing him one as well, then begins to undress for a photo shoot. As he picks up his camera, his vision blurs and he passes out.

When regains consciousness, he finds himself tied to a chair. The usual shyness and innocence has vanished from Hayley’s face, replaced by an insidious look. A few lines of dialogue from the coffee shop (“A few doctors think I am insane”) begin to take on new meaning for the audience as their assumptions are turned inside out.

The audience discovers that Hayley is on a mission to stop pedophiles from attacking young girls. In an attempt to stop him from being a pedophile, she considers castrating him. With the help of a knife and a handy medical book that she happened have, she conducts the “surgery.” To make things worse, she calls up Jeff’s girlfriend pretending to be an officer from the NYPD, luring her to the house. After some intense who-is-going-to-kill-whom-suspense, Hayley blackmails Jeff into doing something so ridiculous that you have to the see the movie.

It doesn’t take long to discover that “Hard Candy” is not a typical Hollywood movie, but a movie made by an independent filmmaker.

The role of Sandra Oh (“Sideways” and “Grey’s Anatomy”) as a neighbor seems to have been forcibly inserted only to make audience wonder if Hayley is going fail in her mission. The movie ends on a note of ambiguity as the audience is left thinking, “Who was telling the truth?” Hayley, of course, seems insane: No 14-year-old girl in her right mind would castrate a man alive. But then again, she says, “I am every little girl who you ever touched, hurt, screwed.”

Throughout the film, Jeff denies being a pedophile and denies killing a woman. However, the fact that he chooses not to call 911 in a moment of freedom late in the movie points toward his guilt.

The title of the movie is as ambiguous as the story itself. “Hard Candy” has a double meaning and applies both to Jeff and Hayley. The “candy” part seems to imply that Hayley is a sweet young girl, but “hard” points to her toughness in ridding the world of pedophiles. Of course, you can’t overlook the phallic implications in a title with the word “hard” in it.