Review of Cuties (2020) by Jennifer_Vinnie — 23 Oct 2020

I get the director’s intention of wanting to bring awareness to the issue regarding young girls sexualising themselves due to being influenced by social media. The movie itself...doesn’t show that.

The movie itself made its original intent blurry. Is it trying to bring awareness to the issue by exposing the harsh truths or is it just a movie that relies on shock value to simply make audiences barf? The resolution itself is also unclear. The ending is just Amy reverting back to a normal girl and playing jump rope with other kids. But the other loose threads like what happened to the rest of the dance crew or if Amy ends up facing harsher consequences for her more questionable actions like posting a picture of her privates online or pushing Yasmine into a lake (thankfully not drowning).

The film itself is the example of presenting the problem (the sexualisation of young girls) and not giving a proper resolution for it.

And let’s not get into the rather questionable ethics of casting child actresses to do horrendous things like dancing sensually. Thank goodness nothing else bad happened (aside from, y’know, what they just did). Now I get that the movie is trying to expose brutal honesty, but for all their talk on how bad this is, the camera shots and angles glamourises it. It’s like trying to kill actual people just to say “murder is bad” or actually raping the actor/actress just to say “rape is bad”.

The only redeeming qualities are at least we know that we should be more aware of what children browse on social media, how sexualising oneself won’t give you actual freedom and to never let your children star in movies where they will be sexualised.

I would at least wish that the director can learn from her mistakes and hopefully not repeat it if she wants to make another movie. She may have created Cuties, but we al know she meant no actual malice (unlike the Sundance co-founder, who is much, MUCH worse).