Very disappointing...

How sad is this?

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This is an excellent satire of middle class America, where the protagonist experiences alienation from peers and family alike. Dawn rarely has meaningful moments or bonds, and when she does, it is transient. The fact that she ends up spurning her only friend is a cutting, realistic portrayal of the food chain - being picked on, and doing it to someone else. Yet this film is not deeply depressing. Dawn never gives up in a way, she keeps going despite the jeers. Todd Solondz shows no mercy in his portrayal of parenting, childhood and bullies. Interactions with people are often an irritation, something to be tolerated but is not particularly pleasant. This is a movie that shows what it's like when your loved ones apparently don't give a s*** about you.

Ha ha ha. Her friends make her poop on the floor of the school bathroom. Her little sister gets kidnapped by a pedophile and is kept prisoner in sub-floor space. Isn't that funny? I didn't think so. I can enjoy very dark humor. I can laugh about things that others find offensive, so it takes something really cruel and raw to turn my stomach. This was not done in a satirical way. It looked dead serious, but they added little tidbits here and there to let you know it was supposed to be a comedy. I wasn't sure in the movie theater whether I was more disturbed by the movie, or by the fact that other viewers were laughing! If you aren't disturbed by pedophilia, excrement-related bullying and other such themes, and in fact, you find all of those topics very funny, this may be just the movie for you. The actors were very talented and certainly convincing in their roles. The director made it all seem very real. Enjoy!

Welcome to the Dollhouse is about a girl named Dawn who fails to find a place anywhere in society. She seems to be the victim of middle child syndrome as her parents are too worried about their other two children to bother much with her. Dawn's brother is already established as the brainy oldest child and her sister is the cute one, leaving her without an easy way to establish her own identity. At school she is is unable to fit in at least partially because her parents don't care enough about her to help her dress normally for her age. Because she isn't nurtured at home, she also fails to develop socially and her personality is too thin to make her sympathetic to the other students. Predictably, she is treated as poorly at school as she is at home.Welcome to the Dollhouse is full of these devastating scenes in which Dawn get her hopes up only to have them knocked down again. Her parents and classmates are oblivious to her suffering; no matter how bad things are for her nobody ever seems to think about her feelings. Things also tend to go against her as a matter of course. She is frequently unlucky as when she attempts to get revenge on her tormentors and accidentally targets an unsuspecting adult.Welcome to the Dollhouse does a fairly good job of capturing an unfortunate girl at a particularly awkward time of life. It suffers from a lack of realism at times, however, since it's unlikely that every teacher and student would hate a person that is more bland than offensive. Even more detrimental than the film's lack of realism in establishing Dawn's situation is the film's lack of style. The visuals are unremarkable and the only memorable aesthetic choice is the tacky design in Dawn's home. The plot takes a detour into absurdity when Dawn's sister is kidnapped but surprisingly this isn't really played for laughs in spite of some humorous elements.I was surprised to learn that this wasn't director Todd Solondz's first feature as it felt like the work of a film-maker looking to gain enough confidence to do the things he really wanted to. Welcome to the Dollhouse does an adequate job of establishing a single character but it feels like it's missing some crucial elements that could have made it truly memorable.

This film well encapsulates the horrors of middle school, perhaps more than was your experience, but the point is well taken. This unfortunately-named girl (Dawn Wiener), whose plight is not helped by her gawky looks, nerdiness, and refusal to take her punishment lying down, brings the pain of middle school into sharp relief. Having read a lot of the comments on IMDb, it's clear that this movie resonates with many. Landmark director Todd Solondz doesn't shrink from depicting the most cringe-inducing, skin-peeling, soul-destroying tortures inflicted by kids on their peers during those difficult tweener/teen years. Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo) lives with a mother who has no idea of the pain in which her daughter is in and with a father with no guts to intervene to his wife on his daughter's behalf. Her older brother is an academic success, although also very nerdy and her younger sister is the belle of the ball who can do no wrong in her mother's eyes.Solondz has constructed a very plausible hell in which his young protagonist suffers. She has no friends save for one boy who is the only other member of her "Special People Club". Her locker is the site of some particularly vitriolic abuse (although, having worked at schools, I found it implausible to believe that no teacher would have intervened to have the abuse removed), she is called "lesbo" and one girl who is particularly nasty will not let her leave the restroom without taking a crap.I liked the fact that this protagonist does not take the abuse lying down. Solondz creates such a good movie that he does not make Wiener into a wallflower. Indeed, she reacts in sometimes callous ways, taking out the anger she feels on someone less powerful than her. It's not necessarily pretty, but it's human nature. She reacts in anger to several things and I found this refreshing. She is not depicted as an ineffectual person. She fights back against her treatment-which people do, in real life-and Solondz deserves credit for this characterization of his protagonist. This really is a tough film to watch but I think this is one many young teens and tweeners would do well to watch and discuss with their parents because it could be a jumping-off point for a discussion about bullying and cruelty at this very difficult age.