“A Film by David Schwimmer” is not the sort of credit that fills me with anticipation, but I must admit he’s done a solid job with this queasy drama about the rape of a 12-year-old Wilmette girl. Lured to a downtown hotel by a middle-aged online predator, who violates her and then disappears, the love-struck child (Liana Liberato) defends her assailant after a friend rats her out at school and the FBI is called in. The girl’s dumbfounded mother (Catherine Keener) and enraged father (Clive Owen) try to make her understand what’s happened to her, but they’re no match for her tangled shame, anger, and unreasoning schoolgirl crush. When dad takes the law into his own hands, this begins to suggest a millennial version of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), with a vivid disgust for our hypersexualized society. But screenwriters Andy Bellin and Robert Festinger (the latter cowrote In the Bedroom) mostly avoid Schrader’s puritanical sensationalism by focusing tightly on the family’s private turmoil. With Viola Davis and Noah Emmerich.
Trust
R • 1 hour 46 min • 2011