Metacritic reviews

Evan Glodell's debut has the sweetness of a lullaby reverie and the blazing ferocity of a monster-car nightmare, a first-comes-elation, then-comes-madness structure that resembles that of "Blue Valentine," another tale focused on the commencement, and then collapse, of an affair.

Here's a movie that starts in your face and, amazingly, keeps coming at you. That's a good thing.

Despite its meandering plot, Bellflower presents its doom-laden vision as an astonishingly distinctive state of mind, arguing that the end of one self-made world always marks the start of a new one.

Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous.

In one grease-monkey swoop, Glodell proves that he's a subversive talent worth following. Let a thousand of his future projects bloom.

Bellflower is a genuine breakthrough, and after its own profoundly flawed fashion, a work of genius.

It's messy and leaves an unusual taste on the palate, but Bellflower has a strange, ugly-sweet appeal that couldn't have been produced without the schlocky entertainments that have channeled the imaginations of gifted but impressionable kids for decades.

A likely cult hit among horror fans and a gleeful affront to more delicate sensibilities, Bellflower takes the young-adult romantic-comedy blueprint and subjects it to a kind of devilish origami, creating a disturbed and disturbing parable about young male fantasies, fears and avoidance of adulthood.

In the end, Glodell's bona fide B-movie is monumentally dumb but damn near undeniable - although perhaps only a midnight drive-in screening in rural Texas, beat-up Chevys dripping muffler fluid and steam hissing from hot gravel, could do it proper.

It is, without a doubt, a striking debut. But it's also punishingly distasteful and disjointed almost beyond coherence, a repetitive heap of a film that feels disgorged rather than crafted.