Beautiful, moving film.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Darren (Oliver Ackland) is an introverted teen at a high class school. His step-brother Zack (Alex Russell) is the popular kid who often throws raging parties. Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens) is a sweet girl taken with Darren. She attends Zack's party hoping to find him. Instead, she is drugged and raped by Zack and his friends. The group starts spreading rumors about Xandrie as she struggles to put it behind her. Darren refuses to let it go.There are almost no adults in this movie which gives it a great 'Lord of the Flies' feel. There are harrowing scenes and devastating bullying. It's disturbing. There is an incident with Xandrie that should stand as the climax. It really should be pushed back towards the end. The intensity fizzles after the incident.

could not figure out the the other ratings until i saw that they were from Australia, could understand 20 percent at best. How this gets by the people that made and market the film is mind boggling. Sub titles are needed here sadly, these people do not speaka the English. It is way worse then cockney English which you could possibly learn to follow. We are separated from Australians by a common lanquage. I am not a linguist so i am not sure what they are doing when they speak, its a combination of rapidity and the clipping of words, speaks slower and enunciate You can understand older Aussie films, so this is definitely something new, The film had a pricey budget so this is a error of the first degree. This is hubris, well i am stunned

Wasted on the Young is an intense movie in the vein of Animal Kingdom but with a subject matter most similar to Brick. It is well crafted and the production value seems high for the tight budget they were undoubtedly restricted to.The film is about a group of young people in an Australian private school whose lives are changed due to a horrific event that takes place at a wild party at the "alpha male" of the school's house. It is a very intense and engaging movie but unfortunately the ending was a bit of a let down and didn't really fit with the rest of the film.The absence of any adult or authority figures in the movie is telling and the interaction between the perpetrators and victims is at times very disturbing.It is a very interesting movie and it is a shame the ending wasn't as good as I hoped it would be but it well worth spending the time and money to see this film.

Zack (Alex Russell) and Darren (Oliver Ackland) are stepbrothers who are living under the same luxurious roof together while their parents are away. Both boys are on the high school swimming team but Zack is certified as the captain. He's involved with drugs and throwing parties though and is made untouchable by his reputation and his two friends who act like standover men. Darren is far more withdrawn. He spends most of his time studying and playing games but also manages to catch the eye of Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens). She's set to meet him at a party but he arrives late and can't find her. A jealous girl thinks that Xandrie is going to sleep with Zack so she spikes her drink and leaves her at the mercy of Zack and his goons. She is assaulted and left for dead on a beach. With the weight of guilt on his shoulders for ignoring Xandrie, Darren sets out to find out the truth, firstly consulting a security recording of the night. I admire the courage of the Australian film industry, specifically its uncompromised approach in dealing with important social issues. People who value cinema for safe, populist entertainment often sneer at these gritty and challenging films. As such, they regular fail to excite the box office and are viewed foolishly as artistically meritless. But as important as it is for a film to challenge the realities of our society, there is fine line between a well researched critique of an issue, like in Blessed and The Combination and cheap sensationalism and finger pointing. Writer and director Ben C. Lucas cannot find the balance. There's a nastiness running all throughout his film. It's deliberately claustrophobic, filmed with harsh, dark textures and cold steel. It's effective in unsettling us through its look, its heavy ambient sound effects and clever structure too. It begins in medias res, with Xandrie's body on the beach and then goes back in time to work up to the crime. Where it falters is in its lack of moderation. Lucas doesn't believe in any. His film travels from one extreme to another, solely to inflate the drama and reinforce parents' preconceived ideas about their children. Lucas likes to paint broad strokes and is for one blindly nihilistic in his outlook of multimedia. The social networking sites and the text messaging shown in the film regularly lead to miscommunication and rumour. The convenience and usefulness of the technology feels entirely overshadowed and overlooked. Even the possible video evidence of the crime takes a backseat to overly dramatic confrontations. Similarly, teenagers might not be the most pleasant people but there are very few who are completely irredeemable. Yet Lucas tries his best to make us think so about a number of his characters. There's a lot of mean- spirited behaviour, coarse dialogue and the needlessly excessive violence. At the beginning of a film a boy asks Zack about the party to which he responds in asking if he's looking for a corner to blow him. The boy is then punched in the face, without consequence. For whatever reason, a freakish red haired kid is also shown sending pictures of his penis to girls at school. There are multiple public beatings in this film too, with people punched and cracked over the head with bottles, a school shooting and even a more implied torture scene. It's gratuitous, not insightful, because these scenes exist only to be climactic, rather than having a willingness to explore deeper psychological experiences. These problems are frustrating because glimpses of more rounded and developed characters are occasionally visible. Darren is understandably driven by guilt, even if Ackland can't take us to the right emotional levels, beyond his hollow eyes. Russell also makes Zack a more interesting baddie, even if he is a little heavy handed. Zack's a sport jock, but a logical one and uses common sense to distance himself from the chaos. If only Lucas didn't undermine an interesting trait straight after Zack talks himself out of a situation with a panic attack. It weakens our belief in his confidence. Clemens impressed me the most. With limited on screen time she's appropriately more conscious about the situation than anyone else and is as such, more natural, human and touching. The lack of adult characters is still a big pitfall. It's meant to ride the metaphor that these kids have no one to answer to. But their omission is never properly explained and it allows Lucas to distance them from a lot of the blame. Like so much of the film, it just makes us wonder why he's so strictly negative about today's youth.