Director: Pippa Bianco

The second film I watched today (after To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) is another film about teens, but they couldn’t be more different. Share is darker, both in subject matter and in execution. In it, sixteen-year-old Mandy (outstanding newcomer Rhianne Barreto) comes to one night on her front lawn. She’s clearly been drinking, and taking stock of her body, she finds bruises and other signs that indicate that something physical must have happened to her earlier in the night. The trouble is, she doesn’t remember anything. The next evening, though, she gets bombarded by texts from classmates telling her how sorry they are and asking if she’s okay. She doesn’t know what they’re talking about until one of them sends a blurry video, taken by someone at the party she attended. In it, Mandy is unconscious and surrounded by several boys, one of whom has pulled down her pants, exposing her bare bottom. They’re laughing and making comments and then the video stops.

The rest of the film deals with the aftermath of the leaked video, now seen by classmates, administration, and even Mandy’s parents, Mickey (J.C. MacKenzie) and Kerri (Poorna Jagannathan). This is a story that’s been seen (and handled well) by a number of different films. What makes this film different is that it’s not focused on the idea of getting justice for Mandy, but rather it explores Mandy as a victim not only of an attack that night, but as a victim of the steamroller that is social media.

Everybody seems to have an agenda in their—often well-meaning—response to the incident. Mandy’s parents want her to report it to the police, to meet with a hypnotist to try to recall the events, and even suggest making a statement to the school. Her schoolmates are upset about the boy who made the recording getting arrested and removed from the basketball team. The boy’s father wants to let everyone know that his son wasn’t raised that way, while at the same time trying to make excuses to reduce his son’s responsibility for the incident. Even Mandy’s friends want her to come out and drink and get high and forget all about the unpleasantness. All things we’ve encountered in other films about sexual assault on teens. But in this film, all of that becomes peripheral, and we remain focused on Mandy, and we watch her on autopilot, bending to the will of the police, her friends, her parents, but never really dealing with the incident on her own terms. We watch the vitality slowly drain from her, not from the incident itself (she seems more concerned with finding out what happened than anything else), but from the aftermath. She wants to be normal, to blend in, to not be looked at or treated differently. In many ways, she becomes a victim not just of the boys in the video, but of all those around her, even those who only want the “best” for her.

Without revealing too much, I have to say that the end of the film is divisive. There are many who will complain (and have complained) that they don’t like the ending. Besides the fact that movies aren’t always going to please everyone with their endings, I want to reiterate that this film is less about discovering the truth and getting justice than it is about giving Mandy the freedom, as the victim, to do what she feels is best for her, not what we the audience might feel is best. Keeping that in mind, you may find that although you may not like the ending, you may at least understand it.

One last word: keep your eyes on Rhianne Barreto. She is phenomenal in this very difficult role. If she falls flat, or plays it too one-note, this film fails. She nails it. I expect to see much more of her in the future.

IMDb posts this at a rather low 5.5, probably because of the ending’s potential to divide people. I would give this at least a 6.5, based primarily on Barreto’s performance. (running time 1:27)