What it’s about: Nicole (Witherspoon) is sixteen and has spent the last year living with her dad Steve (Petersen), and step-mom Laura (Brenneman) outside Seattle. Their relationship is awkward and her once-estranged father wants to give her space, which she uses to go out to cafes and clubs with her friend Margo (Milano). On these outings, she catches the eye of David (Wahlberg), a guy in his 20s with a murky background who sweeps her off her feet. Everyone is charmed except Steve, who just can’t shake a bad feeling, and even as Nicole begins to see the cracks in David’s romantic facade, her father’s escalating interventions catch her between a rock and a hard place. Eventually, however, David goes too far and the family must come together as his obsession with Nicole descends into all-out violence.

Reflections: I haven’t seen this in quite a few years and I remember it being sort of mid, an impression its reviews seem to back up. But taken in the context of unhinged ’90s thrillers–a subgenre I have a fondness for, I admit–there’s a lot to enjoy here. The plot is certainly not invested in subtlety, but when it does veer into the ridiculous–the tattoo scene leaps to mind–it’s both funny and uncomfortable. Wahlberg–in his third film and first starring role–is a little wooden as David, who is written as essentially a cypher anyway, but he brings a kind of thick malevolence that works for a movie that’s less about following through on logical details than rolling along through big, dumb emotions. And there are moments when it works well; the rollercoaster scene is objectively silly, but captures that adolescent feeling of sexual awakening in an almost fantastical way.

The biggest problem, I think, is that the movie is pulling in two directions: one where it’s Nicole’s story, a coming-of-age romantic thriller; and one where it’s Steve’s story, about paternal anxiety and the primal instinct to defend one’s family awakening an unknown vitality. It’d be great if they met in the middle, but they don’t, quite. By the end, Nicole feels a little sidelined, and neither of them are fleshed out as much as they should be. Both actors are bringing what they can, though. Petersen leans into the unsympathetic aspects of his character, going for kind of a suppressed, midlife-crisis edginess, like the smug satisfaction of telling David off at the door. And Witherspoon is selling what she has, pulling a fine line between burgeoning independence and total naivete from a script that doesn’t seem to relate to her quite as much.

This came out the same year as Scream, so it barely predates the teen-slasher resurgence, but it’s tapping into the same cultural moment–the top billing of two hot young stars early in what would be major careers, the of-the-moment soundtrack (Bush, The Sundays’ cover of “Wild Horses”), the way the questionably-sexy first half transforms into a home-invasion film by the final act–it’s just trying to modernize psychological horror, rather than gore. Seen through that lens, it’s different enough to be interesting. Even if there is definitely a far more interesting movie in what it only gestures at, there’s a lot it does well, and while it’s very silly, it is also genuinely unsettling at times and I had a good time watching it.