Trust (2010)

David Schwimmer's Trust arrives with the gravity of a public service announcement that has been to film school. A fourteen-year-old girl named Annie is groomed in a chat room, meets a man she believes is a boy, and is raped in a motel while he films it. The film refuses to soften this. Schwimmer spent years with The Rape Foundation and roughly fifty drafts sharpening the thing, and the result is a sober, well-acted chamber piece that treats its subject with intelligence and sympathy. It is a serious film about a serious crime. That seriousness, however, is not the same as a program of social reform, and the picture mostly keeps its politics to itself.

There is a mild current of cultural awareness running beneath the surface. Annie's father works at an advertising firm that peddles provocative images of teenagers, a passing jab at the media machine that the film never develops into an argument. A hospital counselor, played by Viola Davis, offers the girl a patient ear, and Annie's mother carries her own quiet share of the anguish. These are humane gestures, not a thesis. Race is never raised. Neither is sexual identity, nor body image, nor the climate. The film has one subject and it stays on it.

Where the picture does lean forward is in its sense of mission. It wants us to understand how online predation works, how a child can be groomed into calling her abuser a boyfriend, how a family fractures in the aftermath. The lessons arrive through performance and consequence, not through speeches, which is the honorable way to do it. A post-credits revelation lands with a cold thud. The whole enterprise is earnest, well-meaning, and only occasionally preachy. It instructs us gently. It does not shout.