Former Disney child star Bella Thorne, now more notorious for a kerfuffle around her OnlyFans account, stars in this muddled horror feature as a young woman called Clare who is convinced she is on a mission from God to slay sex abusers and other bad men. (The fact that university student Clare looks so pretty is a distinct advantage in her quest for deserving victims.) Like predatory creep Joe (Bart Johnson), they find her seemingly by accident, pre-equipped with stock photo prints of their mythical children and hip-flasks full of spiked booze, hoping to dupe her into getting in the car so she can be raped or worse. But Clare has mad self-defence skills, homicidal instincts of her own, and a backpack conveniently stocked with rubber gloves and lint rollers just in case she needs to wipe away fingerprints and evidence.
Funnily enough, it seems there have been numerous unsolved disappearances of young women in the very town in which she lives with her retired actor grandma, Gigi (Rebecca De Mornay, underused but feisty). So Clare gets investigating and nearly every man she meets seems suss, apart from the campus’s flamboyantly gay theatre director (Joel Michealy) who is clearly just there for comic relief. And yet Clare doesn’t seem all that good at building relationships with women either, given the toxic, bitchy interactions she has with supposed friends Amity (Erica Dasher) and Juliana (Joy Rovaris), mean girls whom the film seems quite happy to put in danger.
This is adapted from a novel by Don Roff, the script crafted by director Mitzi Peirone and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner. Turner, also an actor, was once quite a name in the indie movie world with credits for co-writing Go Fish and American Psycho among others, but this doesn’t really have the same zeitgeist-harmonising thrum. Instead, it plays as pseudo-feminist horror for viewers who don’t really like women, or, for that matter, men. Or people of any gender. It’s all curdled but not in an especially interesting way, although there is no denying that Thorne has a basic charisma that holds the screen, and Ryan Phillippe is well cast as a grouchy cop whose agenda doesn’t mesh with Clare’s.
• Saint Clare is on digital platforms from 21 July.
