Adrian's Diagnosis

Yeah, I've actually heard BPD said before as what she has too oddly enough.

This is not at all a knock, but I hear BPD constantly when referring to mental health. I know little about it, but it feels like the late 19th/early 20th century when we knew nothing about medicine and called a problem whatever was convenient/in style.

Borderline Personality Disorder has become a bit of a "catch all" for psychological problems that may not truly be indicative of BPD. One of the defining characteristics of BPD would be an instability of self-perception, which doesn't seem to be the case here at all.

A more likely scenario comes from more recent literature that suggests that the brains of "intellectually gifted" individuals can take substantially longer to mature socially and emotionally.

So, you have a teenage girl with an extremely high intellect...throw some hormones into the mix...along with a greatly impaired ability to regulate her emotions.

Voila! You have Darian/Adrian in a nutshell!

My only complaint is that they should have followed through. Someone as intelligent as her would ONLY return to the house at the end to destroy or hide any evidence that she set Nick up (like the diary, that promised to play some big part in this story, but kind of went nowhere...plus the shrines) and definitely wouldn't have set up a big apology shrine on her bed, unless some kind of suicide attempt was involved.

Even more far fetched is her going on to tie up her "best friend", repeatedly attack Nick with an iron bar, then paradoxically attack her dad for attacking Nick (he obviously still believed her at that stage)...all culminating in her being locked in a psych ward.

I wish this had played out a bit more like "Election", or "Little girl who lives down the lane"...because in real life, the good guys don't always win, and/or highly intelligent people DO get away with crimes BECAUSE they're so intelligent. An otherwise good movie was wrapped up way too conveniently, complete with the highly predictable "sinister twist" at the end.

Anyhow, Nick is such a "Mary Sue" character, that I don't think the audience would have minded seeing him get royally screwed over by an emotionally unstable, 14 year old evil-genius...especially if they'd devoted even a little bit of screen time to creating sympathy for her otherwise pathological character.

Garden variety "obsessed nut" is not really good enough, especially given that this is based on actual events. The writer's bias is obvious, and it's to the detriment of this movie.