Warning: This review contains discussion of underage sexuality, discussion of sexual assault, and light spoilers for Look Away.

Look Away, originally titled Behind the Glass, is a psychological thriller produced and filmed in Canada. It was released in 2018, and was written and directed by Assaf Bernstein. It’s a film that is all at once compelling and disconcerting, in ways that have netted it mixed reviews.

Personally, there’s a lot I loved about Look Away. It was confronting and difficult, while also being a surprisingly human story that soon reveals itself as being much more complicated than the teen horror flick it first appears to be. Unfolding the life of lonely, timid, repressed and ultimately bullied teenager Maria Brennan (India Eisley), it tells a story of family dysfunction, mental illness, trauma, and the bizarre, nightmarish permutations that grief can take on when left unchecked and unanswered.

If you’re planning on watching Look Away, I’d advise being aware of its darker content first, though I’ll try to stay as spoiler-light as possible. It does contain nudity and sexuality of underage characters, along with sexual violence, sexual harassment, several mentions and depictions of an eating disorder, suicidal ideation and self-harm, parental abuse or neglect, infidelity, ableism, and a complicated childbirth.

One of the immediately striking things about Look Away is that, despite its title, it’s visually stunning. It makes excellent use of both light and shadow, and some of the more brightly-lit scenes are actually more unsettling than the night-time sequences. Lingering, intimate shots of India Eisley’s face draw us quickly and immersively into her universe and emotional landscape. The sets are clearly designed and assembled with a lot of thought to capture very precise sensibilities, but feel organic and natural as well.

The soundtrack and soundscape are equally alluring. The nearly exclusively-instrumental soundtrack pulls no punches, starting off quietly tense and only escalating to ominous heights. When sung popular music does appear, it’s admittedly jarring, but in a way that works. It’s alternately emblematic of how out of place Maria feels in her peers’ world, and her emerging into herself as the movie unfolds.

The sound effects, too, are sharp, crisp, and inescapably sensual, adding to the nearly uncomfortably immersive experience. Look Away has a great deal to say about the physical selves we inhabit. To keep us in that place with the characters, the expertly balanced, vibrant use of sound works out impressively well to keep us rooted in our senses throughout the movie.

The visual and aural landscapes of the movie are just the stage on which its cast move and breathe, though. India Eisley is the undeniable show-stealer, fractious and aggressive, needy and cruel, desperate and hostile by turns. She wields impressive range within a deeply flawed, tragic character that we are both sympathetic toward and unnerved by.

Jason Isaacs shows off his chops, too, as an unequivocally reprehensible father and cosmetic surgeon who lacks the means and the will to relate to his growing, changing daughter. Mira Sorvino strikes a conflicted yet poignant note as a depressed former socialite who, due to traumas we discover later, can’t quite bring herself to stand up to her husband’s domineering ways and defend her daughter.

Ultimately, Look Away confronts a core tension of the neglected, traumatized and traumatizing adolescent girl. Namely, it confronts the increasingly desperate need to be seen, understood, and ultimately loved. More importantly, it also confronts the need to see and understand herself in the process. Dialogue to this effect appears time and again, in both subtle exchanges and at climactic moments in the movie. This need crumbles as Eisley’s character repeatedly self-destructs her chances to achieve just that, and doesn’t find resolution until the very last shots of the film.

So far, this is where I’ve disagreed with or diverged from the negative reviews. I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that most (though, admittedly, not all) of these negative reviews have been written by men, who may or may not have missed the point.

Where I do agree with some of the criticisms, though, is that Look Away comprises a lot more nudity than I was expecting or prepared for. Although India Eisley was solidly a 25-year-old adult at the time of Look Away’s release, she is playing the role of an underage girl, being written and directed by an adult man. This stood out uncomfortably on its own, but it stood out especially in light of India Eisley’s previous comments about performing nude scenes and not just wanting them to be “for shock.”

Casting adult women to play teenage girls so you can “get away with” showing them naked and putting them in fairly explicit sex scenes, with no fade-to-black, is certainly unsettling at best. Of course, many teenagers have sex. It would be disingenuous (and unhelpful) to pretend otherwise.

Yet I, for one, have very much stopped having much tolerance for adults over-sexualizing teenage girls because they can. Look Away’s third act, in particular, loses the thread of what it was trying to say about Maria’s sexual development and increasingly looks like someone’s sexual fantasy.

Equally concerning, Look Away muddies the waters by having Eisley play sexual aggression and a borderline-desperate need to be wanted to the point of being questionably consensual, at best. By having the young man opposite her “cave” after several “token” refusals, it replicates the myth that men can’t really be sexually assaulted. Not only that, but it also introduces an unhelpful, puzzling degree of ambiguity into how we’re supposed to feel about Eisley’s character.

For the majority of the movie, Dan (Maria’s father) increasingly reveals himself as the true villain of the piece. Come the third act, though, Look Away takes a sharp left turn into being so invested in sexualizing Maria that it near-entirely misses the mark and embroils her in committing sexual violence instead. This change of course troubles my ability to read her as the deeply flawed but ultimately sympathetic character she was (I can only assume) meant to be. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to have that issue.

All in all, I am by and large of the opinion that Look Away doesn’t deserve some of the flak it’s gotten. It doesn’t really deserve having been dismissed as hollow, lackluster, or not clever enough to execute the ideas it presents. I think it did all of those things, with the help of a great cast and a stellar visual and auditory landscape. If it hadn’t been so absolutely bizarre about the bodies and sexualities of teenage girls, I’d have liked to give it a higher rating than I have. I don’t think it’s necessarily deliberately pernicious, but I hope Bernstein has seen those reviews that did comment on these problems, and will take them to heart for his future work.

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Look Away

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Visually gorgeous
• Fantastic soundtrack
• Great cast
• Atmospheric and compelling
• No unnecessary jumpscares

Cons

• Unnecessary nudity
• Uncomfortable handling of underage bodies/sexuality
• Muddies its own plot at times