It’s brilliantly acted and a fascinating, incredibly fraught thing to watch, especially as the numerous female directors film their interactions with a strange, deep kind of intimacy that borders on sexual – and again feels very familiar to anyone who had a toxic but exhilarating relationship with their female friends when they were young. Beth and Addy’s obsession with Colette feels stalkerish, like a murderer scoping out a victim, while Colette flips back and forth from naive to cunning, from vulnerable to more than capable of handling herself – and handling these teenage girls. Every episode (of the three I've seen, at least) starts with a voiceover from Addy and she repeatedly, reverently, talks about the things that Colette once said to her. The greatest source of tension comes from the relationship between the three main characters: the obsession they all have with each other veers into love-triangle territory, though sometimes they seem to hate each other. But it’s not just the teenagers who are at it – there isn’t a single adult in Dare Me that you be able to call “responsible”, apart from perhaps Addy’s absent police-officer mother. Then, once they’ve finished physically hurting each other, the mind games begin – name calling, manipulation, subtle psychological torture, all the usual things you’d find in a girls’ locker room. They crash into and onto each other, make each other bleed and bruise, and don’t look back before going on to the next move. The cheerleading itself is also fairly brutal – they fling each other through their air while the camera lingers on muscles straining, sweat flying, faces grimacing in pain and exertion. In true noir form there are vices aplenty: the teenagers seem to be living their lives in a blur of drugs, sex, stealing their parents’ booze, and drinking said booze straight from the bottle while driving down the highway. It follows two cheerleaders, bad-girl Beth (Marlo Kelly) and her best friend, Addy (Herizen F Guardiola), and their new coach, Colette (Willa Fitzgerald), as the cheer team fights to become more successful and the personal lives of the people within fall apart. The strange lovechild of Cheer, Euphoria and You, it’s a thriller based on the novel of the same name by Megan Abbott, who is best known for taking the traditionally male genre of noir and applying it to women’s lives – in this case, cheerleading. Or rather it flips it, makes it do a back handspring, then puts it at the top of a human pyramid for everyone to see. Any woman who’s lived through a brilliant, terrible adolescence knows just how dangerous the boredom of teenage girls can be, and how uneasy you should feel lest you become the victim of it.ĭare Me takes that unease and runs with it. It’s a stereotype, yes, but whereas teenage boys punch and kick out their differences then quickly get back to normal, teenage girls are cats who like to play with their prey. It’s the kind of line that leaves most men cold, while sending a shiver down the spine of almost every woman. The first line of Dare Me (Netflix), the noir cheerleading TV drama released today, is: “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
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