The film opens with a sexually charged, flirtatious online chat between two people with the screen names Thonggrrrl14 and Lensman319. Lensman319 is a photographer who admits to “fantasizing” about Thonggrrrl14. Thonggrrrl14 entices Lensman319 to meet at a café to “hook up”. At the café, Thonggrrrl14 – Hayley Stark – meets Lensman319 – Jeff Kohlver. Hayley makes several references to her age (14 years old), yet succeeds in convincing Jeff to take her to his house. After showing her around, Hayley makes them both screwdrivers and asks him to take photographs. Before he can, Jeff gets dizzy, his vision blurs, and he falls to the floor unconscious.
When Jeff wakes, he is bound to a chair. Hayley explains she has been tracking him and drugged him because she knows he is a pedophile, child rapist, and murderer. Jeff denies these allegations, claiming he had innocent intentions. Hayley searches Jeff’s house for evidence of sexually deviant crimes. She finds Jeff’s gun and safe. In the safe, Hayley finds “sick” pictures and a photo of Donna Mauer, a local girl who had been kidnapped and remains missing. Jeff denies involvement in Mauer’s disappearance and succeeds in reaching his gun, but when he (still bound to the chair) attacks Hayley, she renders him unconscious by asphyxiating him with plastic wrap.
When Jeff wakes, he finds himself bound to a steel table with a plastic bag of ice on his genitals. Hayley explains she will castrate Jeff. To dissuade Hayley, Jeff uses threats, an attempt at a bribe, other negotiations, and in a final, desperate plea for sympathy, he tells her his own story of abuse.
Following the operation, Hayley leaves the kitchen, claiming to take a shower. Jeff struggles and frees himself. When he reluctantly checks the site of the operation, he realizes he is actually unharmed, and Hayley has elaborately faked his castration. He storms off in a rage to get Hayley in the bathroom, where the shower is running. Scalpel in hand, he attacks, only to find the shower empty. Hayley counterattacks him from behind, and as they struggle, Hayley incapacitates him with a stun gun.
Hayley poses as a police officer and asks Jeff’s ex-girlfriend, Janelle, to come immediately to Jeff’s house. Jeff regains consciousness to find that Hayley has bound his wrists and hoisted him to stand on a chair in his kitchen with a noose around his neck. Hayley makes Jeff an offer: if he commits suicide, she promises to erase the evidence of his crimes, but if he refuses, she promises to expose his secrets.
The conversation is interrupted when a neighbor knocks on the front door, selling Girl Scout cookies. Hayley tells the neighbor that she is Jeff’s niece; the neighbor leaves shortly afterwards. When Hayley returns, Jeff breaks free from his bindings and pursues her, eventually finding her on the roof of his house, where she has lured him. Hayley has brought her rope from the kitchen and fashioned it into a noose secured to the chimney. Hayley keeps Jeff at bay with his own gun.
Related Link: Read full production notes for Hard Candy
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