The Ketchup Effect

Twelve-year-old Sofie (Amanda Renberg) can’t wait to start high school, gushing to her best friends about class hottie Mouse, who duly invites her to a party. The style is televisual, the pop soundtrack dodgy; so far, so Swedish ‘Hollyoaks’. What follows, however, is a scene of impressively controlled discomfort that marks ‘The Ketchup Effect’ as more than teen fluff: at the party, a drunken Sofie passes out and is leeringly photographed in compromising positions by Mouse and his cohorts; her name is soon mud, her friends back off, her teacher dad is unimpressed, and things go from bad to worse... The film’s aesthetic might be unremarkable and its plotting as prone to contrived histrionics as its characters, but writer-director Teresa Fabik shows an unusually acute eye for the myriad daily mortifications of adolescence, and the brutally Darwinian dynamics of the school ecosystem – far more plausibly presented here than in the average US high school flick. Renberg, rarely off-screen, also manages to convey self-centred teenage angst without alienating us; her rebuttal of her naive form tutor’s inane attempts at consolation is a particular treat.