Plot

Ellie is an average girl with typical teen problems: a bratty little sister, a nagging mom and a father that denies her the attention she desperately craves. But Ellie's not the kind of girl that gets mad. She gets evil.

Psycho-thriller about a teenage dream girl who seems to be taking her mother's place after losing her to a brutal, unsolved murder. Julia Stiles, in an award-winning performance, stars in this deeply disturbing, wickedly hilarious, Suburban-Gothic, Sundance film festival smash.—Automatic Pictures

Casa Del Norte is a pricey, gated community in the high-desert outside of Los Angeles in this darkly comic, suburban thriller. Fourteen year old Ellie Christianson (Julia Stiles) hates it here. But then, so does her mother Karen, who eases her frustrations in the arms of attractive but explosive next-door neighbor Lawson Smith (Patrick Muldoon). Equally adulterous is Karen's husband Ben (William R. Moses), who's been playing house with the Swedish au pair, Lena. Completing this twisted domestic circle is Inger, 10, a sweet, wide-eyed innocent who is growing up fast.

As tensions mount, Karen threatens to dump both Ben and Lawson and leave with her children. Then, when she's alone packing her bags, someone breaks in... Her body is discovered bludgeoned to death in the kitchen.

Enter veteran Detective Boland (Michael Parks) who suspects Lawson and then Ben, but finds no hard evidence linking them to the murder. After Ben passes a lie detector test, Boland is reluctantly drawn to another angle: Could Ellie have killed her mother?

Meanwhile, we've been wondering the same. We witness Ellie's startling transformation as she orders Inger around, cooks meals, comforts Ben, and tries her best to fit into her mother's slinky clothes. Then, during a raging storm straight out of a Hammer horror film, Ellie crawls under the house and recovers the still-bloody murder weapon, a Greek mask!

After several heart-clenching twists, a couple of romantic liaisons, a blackmail threat to reveal a dark family secret, a second killing and a shooting, we reach the final shocking revelation of which suspect (or suspects) committed the murders.

But whoever it was, Ellie is the real mystery at the story's epicenter. Part film noir moll, part demon child, she carries the sad weight of this comic Neverland on her gowned shoulders with the gravity of a figure out of Greek mythology, an Electra of the suburbs. The question of who-done-it ultimately becomes less important than what fate has in store -- and of what will stand revealed about everybody involved, once the smoke clears.