Sadie

Its honesty and power makes it feel large; you live among these characters in their weary trailer park, aching for them.

Equal parts coming-of-age story and slow-burn thriller, writer-director Megan Griffiths’ quietly absorbing and methodically disquieting drama is a genuine rarity: a sympathetic portrait of a budding sociopath.

While the pace of “Sadie” meanders and is often a bit pokey, the excellent cast, including Danielle Brooks as Carla, the local bartender and Rae’s best friend, brings your attention fully to the dramatic goings-on in this tiny community.

Director Griffiths never lets reality slip too far beyond her film’s grasp, though the sexual complications, all of them, play like melodramatic conventions, some less organic than others. She’s still delivered a convincing portrait of a world and how its limited horizons shape those who might never escape it.

Schloss compellingly combines the rangy wildness of hormonal teenagehood with Sadie’s more terrifying instincts, toeing the line between pissed-off teen and possible psychopath with ease. Her Sadie is both brutally dead-eyed and weirdly charismatic; you simply can’t turn away from her, even when you really, really want to.

The gloomy turns in her film accumulate to such an extreme outcome in the end that you inevitably start raising your eyebrows to the contrived narrative. In that, Sadie shares its protagonist’s most defining attribute — a frustratingly manipulative nature.

Lynskey and Schloss are well matched as mother and daughter, and Griffiths builds a relationship between them as this far-from-innocent teenager navigates her world. That rough journey is worth watching even when this film falls short.