There are bad horror movies, there are boring horror movies, and then there’s An American Crime—a film that somehow manages to be both. Based on the real-life torture and murder of Sylvia Likens in 1965, it markets itself as a “psychological horror drama” but plays out more like a Lifetime special directed by someone who thought Requiem for a Dream was too cheerful.
This is not entertainment. This is the cinematic equivalent of being waterboarded while someone reads court transcripts at you. And yet, somehow, it got Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Because Hollywood will applaud anything so long as it makes them feel miserable and cultured at the same time.
The Premise: Poverty, Cigarettes, and a Murder House
The setup is simple: carnival workers leave their two daughters with Gertrude Baniszewski (Catherine Keener), a chain-smoking single mother who agrees to “babysit” them for 20 bucks a week. Spoiler alert: she is not the kind of babysitter you’d want. If Mary Poppins shows up with a spoonful of sugar, Gertrude shows up with a belt, a cigarette burn, and a reminder that she hasn’t had a good bowel movement since the Eisenhower administration.
Within minutes, Sylvia (Elliot Page) and her sister Jenny are being beaten, burned, and blamed for things they didn’t do. And that’s before the basement becomes Sylvia’s personal torture chamber. It’s less “psychological horror” and more “extended infomercial on why social services should’ve been invented sooner.”
Catherine Keener: Evil on Nicotine
Keener is a fantastic actress, but here she spends two hours glaring, coughing, and channeling her inner chain-smoking PTA villain. Her Gertrude is equal parts slumlord and Bible-thumper, the kind of person who would complain about you putting your recycling in the wrong bin while simultaneously burying bodies in her crawlspace.
The problem? She’s too real. She’s not an entertaining movie monster like Freddy or Leatherface. She’s just a tired woman with too many kids, no money, and a basement hobby that would make Jeffrey Dahmer say, “That’s a bit much.” Watching her isn’t scary—it’s depressing. Like watching someone’s aunt have a nervous breakdown in real time.
Elliot Page: The Sadness Olympics
Elliot Page, as Sylvia, spends the entire movie auditioning for the title of “World’s Saddest Punching Bag.” Every scene is another indignity: burned with cigarettes, beaten with belts, branded with a heated needle, tossed down stairs. If misery were a sport, Sylvia would take the gold medal while the audience takes cyanide shots just to cope.
There’s no arc here, no development—just suffering. It’s like the script was written by a sadistic gym coach: “Okay, in this scene she gets punched. In this one, branded. In this one, she dreams about escaping just so we can crush her spirit again. That’s drama, baby!”
The Baniszewski Kids: The Worst Daycare Ever
Gertrude’s brood of children and their neighborhood friends join in on the torture like it’s a summer camp activity. Forget dodgeball; these kids get together to chain Sylvia in the basement and play “let’s invent new war crimes.” It’s less believable as a film and more like a propaganda reel against unsupervised adolescents.
By the end, you’re convinced that every child in Indiana during the 1960s was either a sociopath or an accomplice. Honestly, if a UFO had landed and the aliens had joined in, it would’ve been more believable than the number of kids casually participating in felony-level abuse without batting an eye.
The Tone: True Crime Meets Torture Porn
The big issue with An American Crime is that it can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it a true-crime drama? A horror movie? An after-school special about the dangers of leaving your kids with strangers?
Instead, it lands in the uncanny valley of misery: too bleak to be entertaining, too exploitative to be art. It’s like someone adapted a court transcript into a Saw sequel but forgot to include the cathartic kills or the twist ending. The only twist here is that Sylvia never actually escapes—her “reunion” with her parents is just a hallucination before she dies. That’s not dramatic irony; that’s cinematic sadism.
The Pacing: Two Hours of Emotional Sandpaper
The movie drags. Every time you think it’s about to shift gears or escalate, it just settles into another round of Sylvia-suffers-while-Catherine-Keener-smokes. The branding scene? Ten minutes of slow, deliberate torment that feels longer than a tax seminar. The endless basement abuse? It’s like watching a snuff film edited for cable.
By the time Sylvia’s ghost narrates the fates of her abusers, you don’t feel closure—you feel relief that the credits are finally rolling.
The Message: America, but Make It Bleak
What’s the takeaway from An American Crime? That poverty makes people cruel? That neighbors won’t intervene if you’re being tortured in broad daylight? That Hoosiers in the 1960s were one missed church service away from becoming medieval inquisitors?
It wants to be a cautionary tale, but it plays like an emotional mugging. You don’t leave wiser; you leave wondering if you should call your mom and apologize for every bad thing you did as a teenager.
Unintentional Comedy
The only laughs (dark, inappropriate ones) come from the absurdity of certain scenes. Gertrude branding Sylvia with the phrase “I’M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT” feels like the work of a supervillain who flunked out of villain school. The sheer number of kids participating in the abuse starts to look like a Monty Python sketch: “And now, for today’s extracurricular activity, please form a line to commit felonies on the tied-up girl in the basement.”
By the halfway mark, the film is so relentlessly bleak that the only sane response is gallows humor. You either laugh, or you gouge your own eyes out with a spoon.
Final Verdict
An American Crime is not horror, not drama, not even effective true crime. It’s a cinematic endurance test—a film that mistakes unrelenting cruelty for art and misery for meaning. Catherine Keener and Elliot Page act their hearts out, but their talent is wasted on what amounts to two hours of emotional waterboarding.
If you want a Sylvia Likens story that actually works, read about the real case—it’s horrifying enough on its own. If you want entertainment, watch literally anything else. This movie is only good if your idea of a fun Saturday night is sitting in a basement with a pack of sadistic children and a chain-smoking Catherine Keener.
Rating: 1 out of 10 Lucky Strikes. One point only because Keener deserves hazard pay for inhaling that much nicotine while trying to act through a script that treats the audience like it’s the one chained in the basement.
