The Crush (1993)

Alan Shapiro's 1993 thriller comes to us from a distant planet where nobody had yet been asked to justify the guest list. Cary Elwes plays Nick, a magazine writer who rents a guest house and becomes the fixation of his landlords' fourteen-year-old daughter, Adrian, played by Alicia Silverstone in her screen debut. She rewrites his article, kisses him at a scenic overlook, then escalates through vandalism, a wasp nest, and a false accusation of assault. The film regards all of this as entertainment. It is not wrong to do so. It is merely from another era.

Viewers trained on contemporary studio output will search in vain for guidance. The cast is uniformly white, and no one involved appears to have given the matter a thought. Adrian's pathology drives the plot as straightforward villainy, not as an invitation to destigmatize anything. There is no sapphic subtext, no meditation on inherited wealth, no shrinking glaciers, no sermon about the male gaze or the beauty standard. Cheyenne, the loyal friend who supplies the backstory and ends up bound on an attic carousel, exists to move the story along. She represents nobody. Even the wasps are simply wasps. The film was sued by a woman who shared the villain's original name, a detail that tells us more about 1993 than any of its themes.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is blank. This is a well-oiled exploitation machine with a C+ CinemaScore and a durable afterlife on cable, and it makes no apologies for its appetites. We can note the achievement without endorsing the worldview. The score, tallied across every category we are obliged to weigh, settles at zero. A cleaner specimen of pre-enlightenment genre craft would be difficult to locate. The sommelier sets down the glass and reaches for the next bottle.