Trust DVD box set

Trust DVD box set begins innocuously enough, before turning into every parent’s worst nightmare and reminding us that innocence on the internet is hard to come by.

Trust is a story about a 14-year-old girl and a predatory pedophile as a series of repercussions in which rape is only the first, and possibly not the worst, tragedy to strike its naive and vulnerable victim. It’s easy to imagine how this story could have been exploited and dumber down. It works instead with intelligence and sympathy.

Annie (Liana Liberato) receives a laptop as a 14th birthday gift from her dad (Clive Owen). She’s something of a loner at school, and forms more meaningful attachments in online chatrooms — to Charlie, for instance, who claims to be her age, and seems to understand her so much better than anyone else.

One day Charlie admits he’s a little older and keeps chipping away at a huge, looming lie by confessing to smaller ones. Annie feels a sting of betrayal with each partial disclosure, but a baseline trust has been formed, and she’s still smitten enough to agree to a deeply unsettling date in a shopping mall. It’s obvious, in person, that he’s three times her age. And yet she is still so very nice.

The story is all too tortuous and complicated. Liana Liberato does such a poignant job of showing how, and why. She has three scenes in particular where her wounded feelings spill out in words of anguish, and they are so well-written and well-acted that they’re heartbreaking. All in all, this movie is powerfully emotional, yes, but also very perceptive.