Avis Metacritic

Love and sex are scary in Bradley Rust Gray's over-Freuded exercise in semi-horror/gender studies.

The mystical allure of this long-awaited "lesbian werewolf movie" turns out to have more value than the real thing.

Imagine a teenage lesbian love story directed by David Cronenberg and you'll have some sense of the weirdness of Jack and Diane. Bradley Rust Gray's attempt to weave horror elements into a fairly conventional narrative yields diminishing returns in this overly stylized effort.

If Benicio del Toro designed Hallmark cards, or if "Lady and the Tramp" were lesbians, they'd have a lot in common with Jack & Diane, a well-constructed, well-intentioned but too deliberate attempt to provoke the unprovokable.

Scenes of the pair staring longingly into each other's eyes go on for so long that they become devoid of meaning, not unlike the film's alchemical fusion of genres.

Werewolves aren't a new metaphor for the wildness of adolescent urges, but Jack & Diane is a trudgingly self-serious affair that doesn't manage to be transporting on either its literal or conceptual levels.

Tonally, the film swings between whispery romance and ominous horror as it explores the dark side of love and lust, including an amusingly gory meditation on the notion that the person you think is your beloved might just rip your heart out.

The story of a young woman (Juno Temple) discovering that she is both a lesbian and a werewolf, Bradley Rust Gray's oddball horror parable starts with an irresistibly trashy premise and proceeds to treat it with the po-faced pretentiousness of a film-school thesis.

Although enthralled by brooding, self-absorbed teenagers, the film doesn't present a single believable one.

Jack & Diane offers a glaring example of a writer and director, Bradley Rust Gray, unable to trust in the simple strength of his material.