Cusp

It's actually a horror movie if you're a parent. This is terrifying.

In this mesmerizing, revelatory and deeply compassionate film, viewers are left with an indelible impression of girlhood at its most precarious and indomitable.

Cusp, with its dreamy imagery of golden sunsets and thunder-y twilights, empty Dairy Queen parking lots, and birds taking flight, is a mood-driven piece of work, sensitive to landscape and environment.

A portrait of modern girlhood, this documentary ultimately becomes a bleak look at the normalization of sexual abuse among the very victimized young women.

In walking the line between asking empathy for these girls and also using them as a sort of cautionary tale, Cusp fails to offer more than a somewhat surface-level understanding of toxic masculinity.

These stories are, of course, important. We need to hear and believe young girls about the daily horrors they live with. But how much detail is too much?

As heavy as Cusp mostly is, the main subjects emerge on the other side of their bad experiences, and its actually remarkable seeing them changenot just physically but emotionally as wellbefore our eyes.

Had the focus been more interesting, this is clearly a team that could have made something really special. As is, Cusp remains a rather forgettable and surprisingly hollow feature for what felt so promising.

While Cusp isn't easy viewing, it documents the harsh reality that rigid gender expectations cause real harm to young people.

[Cusp's] conclusions are neither arrived at through such restrictive channels as libertine abandon and awareness ex nihilo, nor telescoped toward eventual wholeness, for that matter.