American movies typically fail when they want to be edgy and transformative about the subject matter. However, except for the rare film such as Kids (1995),these movies fail to have the courage to deliver on edginess and end up merely teasing edginess.

The positive aspects of the movie. Nadia Alexander plays the ultimate mean girl. I hope her career takes off from this point. Quinn Shepherd does great as a dowdy student who gains confidence gaining some degree of agency as the movie progresses.

If the movie hadn't advertised itself as edgy I would have liked it more. It did and then it didn't deliver. With European movies becoming more explicit, American movies are becoming more PG. Quinn Shepherd wrote and directed the movie and made the decision that she would not ask her actors do to anything more telling than appearing in a bra. Understandable after all the gratuitous scenes usually involving only women. However, the movie is advertised as edgy and transformative when neither the story nor its presentation is either. The top review says that this is an amazing debut film when it is only a very competent Lifetime movie. See it but understand going in what it is and is not.

The girls are attractive; the drama teacher is not. Yet both of the hysterical, psychotic HS girls want him. None of the characters are likable, relatable, or even tolerable. I gave up emotional attachment to the film after the first half. I just let them play it out; and get what they deserved. By the end, I was hoping it would all blow up. But then, it didn't. It didn't do anything at all.

The most compelling part of "Blame" was the development of the role of Abigail, a student whose study of literature overwhelms her life when she begins to identify with the characters. She was apparently suspended from school for her embodiment of Sybil, which is not a good idea when the other students have only one personality. After transferring to another school, Abigail is consumed by the character of Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie" to the degree that she has adopted Laura's limp.

Now, in Mr. Woods's drama class, the students will be putting on scenes from Arthur Miller's "The Crucible." The instructor does not hold conventional auditions, but assigns the role of Abigail to a student with the same name because he thinks that is nifty! This will lead to charges of favoritism and especially strong resentment when another student, Melissa, also wanted to play Abigail, but is relegated to the serving as understudy.

The actual classroom scenes, wherein the students were working on their characters, were deadly dull because they only seemed to be running lines. In a real rehearsal situation, they should be up on their feet and being coached by a director. Instead, the students were merely sitting around and looking over their scripts. Mr. Woods was continually at his desk, paying no attention to staging the play. It was also inconceivable that he would be acting in "The Crucible" with shirt and tie, while the other actors were garbed in Puritan costumes from the seventeenth century.

Melissa serves as the catalyst of the action as she attempts to take down both Abigail and Mr. Woods. Her devious plotting involves allegations of harassment and sexual misconduct on the part of Mr. Woods. Yet, the crucial scene in the principal's office where a police officer is asking her questions, demonstrated that Melissa's allegations were directed more towards her abusive stepfather than to Mr. Woods.

The filmmakers dropped the ball in the film's ending with too many unresolved issues. It made no sense that the impressionable Abigail, whose character in Miller's drama wanted to be Mrs. John Proctor, would settle for a kiss on the forehead and the gift of a coat from Mr. Woods. There was also an inherent dishonesty in the transformation of the villainess Melissa from her Gothic mode into the girl next door in the closing moments of the film.

Despite the compelling performance of the actress playing Abigail, the film had an amateur feel to it. Mr. Woods did a terrible job in casting "The Crucible": the inherent evil that defined the behavior of Melissa would have made for the perfect Abigail in his high school play production.