Alice T. (2019)

Alice T. is special because it treats teenage rebellion not as a headline-grabbing problem to solve, but as a lived-in, intimate storm you can practically feel in the room. Shot with a sharp, naturalistic eye, it pulls you into the tense push-and-pull of a mother and daughter locked in a relationship where love, disappointment, and survival instincts collide. Andra Guti gives a captivating, almost hypnotic performance that makes Alice infuriating one moment and heartbreakingly human the next, as the film blurs the line between the stories she tells and the life she’s trying to endure. It’s not a comfort watch and it won’t satisfy anyone looking for neat moral lessons, but if you want a compelling drama that rings uncomfortably true, this one lingers.

Alice T. is clearly aiming for an unflinching, intimate character study of a troubled adopted teen spiraling into lies as a kind of survival tactic, and it doesn’t flinch from the messiness. The problem is it can feel like the film mistakes relentless unpleasantness for depth, keeping you at arm’s length with a lead who’s hard to empathize with and a drama that sometimes plays more forced than earned. If you need emotional access, believable behavior, or even a sliver of redemption to stay invested, this may feel self-indulgent and exhausting rather than insightful. Still, if you’re drawn to raw, uncomfortable portraits of dysfunction and can handle a protagonist who actively pushes you away, there’s a grim honesty here that might land.