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Excellent but underrated film

A Masterpiece!

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

It's one thing to show a movie about a college professor seducing a college student, but a middle aged man seducing a 14 year old? If we are to believe that this guy actually did that, than he is basically a monster. Why would the girl even speak to him later? Having said that, I don't think they ever had sex. If they did, that would have been much more traumatic and the story would have been about statutory rape, not molestation.The actors do a good job. I like the fact that her friends didn't just take her indiscretions lightly due to being N.Y. liberals. They called her out on her immoral behavior and made her suffer and repent.I understand that the woman who created this story was trying to make a statement about sexual abuse, but in reality she kind of just played to men's prurient interests by showing the scenes she did. Some of them were gratuitous.The whole thing was so slow. Why couldn't our main character just tell everyone off early on and get on with her life? I found the older guy so creepy and our protagonist's continual toleration of him annoying. Even when she does tell him off, it's pretty weak.The Asian lady, the dad, the editor, and the boyfriend were all excellent. But I wouldn't watch it knowing what I know now. It's boring and pointless. However, there were enough decent pieces of dialog and emotion to redeem it from the much lower rating I contemplated.

It's sort of ironic that I happened to watch The Girl in the Book and Diary of a Teenage Girl completely unpremeditated within the same week. Both revolve around statutory rape and portray strong female protagonists, but the stories they are a part of highlight different levels of artistic accomplishment. Unfortunately for The Girl in the Book, it does not take the time to achieve more. As we get to know Alice, both in her youth, when she is abused by a mentoring writer, and in her young adult life, when she is handed the job of overseeing the re-release of the same writer's magnum opus, it becomes apparent that her disheveled present is rooted in this particular past. Detached, self-destructive and incapable of forming lasting relationships, she struggles for meaning and purpose in the hope of ultimately rediscovering her love of writing, her joy for living.This gloomy predicament is anchored in Emily VanCamp's strong performance, but at a mere 86 minutes runtime, it's not enough to convincingly build her character's transformation. The worst hit is her redeeming romance with young and idealistic Emmett, your very own Marty Stu character type, which goes from zero to "one hundred reasons you should forgive me" within twenty minutes. It's a shame that for all its melodrama, it avoids dramatic weight with a vengeance, in a story bow-tied ending you see coming from miles away.Fortunately, the film is not so much about the narrative arc, as it is about its central character, so its faults are bearable. But it's a shame, because it does little with a variation on the Gone Girl scenario about the dividing line(s) between degrees of fictional characters. The escape it sets up is therefore neither original enough, nor thorough enough to elicit your utmost attention and care at all critical junctions.

What to say about this movie, yes it is happening, more as we like to know of. It is a movie about a predator (paedophile), and Alice, one of the predators victims. And yes the story could been taken from the everyday life and is about the pain that follows the rest of the victims life. Most victims in this case Alice, lives are damaged. Well played by Emily VanCamp and Ana Mulvoy-Ten. Michael Nyqvist who plays the predator is doing a good job, but something is missing. The parts where the predator is grooming Alice, are very simplified. It does not show the patients (many month's)and how subtle the predators are working and kneading their victims physical and psychological, everyday one inch closer, everyday decreasing the proprietary space between adult and child, like a predator does on a deer.

An interesting and believable story taken out from the everyday life. It presents a young woman with a weak character whose life is a mess. She seems to be stressed constantly and not being able to go on with her life because of a deep emotional trauma during childhood.The film explores the emotional aspect of the human character and how getting stuck in the past leads to absence of future. Alice is a synonym of an introvert. Despite her hurried life she makes no progress and seems to be standing still. She works hard but she's not successful. She knows what she wants from life but she doesn't do anything to get it. She has built a wall around herself to shield her from the outside world because she's afraid of it.Aside from the actors love as a two-faced feeling also plays a role in this film. Its first act is to disappoint to a level that everything after that is stereotyped as deceitful and untrustworthy. Then it transitions with the main character to show its other face that can tear down the walls someone intentionally built to prevent the future to come in.This film shows the wonderful things that can happen when you open your mind, stop existing in the past and start living today for the future.