Movie Review: The Moth Diaries

The Moth Diaries is based on the cult novel by Rachel Klein about an elite girl’s boarding school where a new arrival threatens established loyalties and may be linked to a spate of campus deaths. At an exclusive girls’ boarding school, a sixteen year-old girl records her most intimate thoughts in a diary. The object of her growing obsession is her roommate, Lucy Blake, and Lucy’s friendship with their new and disturbing classmate. 

Ernessa is an enigmatic, moody presence with pale skin, and hypnotic eyes. Around her swirl dark rumours, suspicions and secrets as well as a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school and Lucy isn’t Lucy anymore, fantasy and reality mingle until what is true and what is dreamed bleed together into a waking nightmare that evokes with gothic menace the anxieties, lusts, and fears of adolescence. 

 

At the centre of the diary is the question that haunts all who read it: Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or has the narrator trapped herself in the fevered world of her own imagining? Mary Harron who directed American Psycho remakes the novel as a brilliant, must-see film, starring Sarah Bolger and of course Lily Cole. Harron said: “This is a chillingly atmospheric horror story with real emotional depth. I’ve tried to stay true to Rachel Klein’s novel in the way it re-works and updates the Gothic tradition and the whole notion of girl-on-girl vampires.”

Avery Parker