It’s an insightful film that delivers an honest portrait of four girls trying to navigate high school, expectations, friendships and their oftentimes heartbreaking need to be desired and loved.

The film gets increasingly hallucinatory as it progresses, and there's a vivid sense of growing danger.

Quinn Shephard’s directorial debut, Blame, leans heavily on this persistent despair, yes, but also leverages it in innovative and occasionally startling ways.

Well-acted and handsomely lensed by Aaron Kovalchik, Blame is an engaging debut that subverts the male gaze that might be associated with this kind of teacher/student relationship drama. It is objective without being titillating as it delivers low-key character driven thrills.

The witch-hunt metaphor that emerges from Abigail’s bullying is more overt than it needs to be, but Shephard clearly didn’t rely on SparkNotes in crafting her film.