‘Flower’ Is Much More Than A Dark Coming-Of-Age Comedy

Erica (Zoey Deutch), a 17-year-old rebel, and her friends consider themselves vigilantes. What that really means, at least in the indie flick Flower, is that they’re a bunch of bored teenagers trying to kill time by seducing older men and then proceeding to extort them. When her mom gets married and her new, fresh-out-of-rehab stepbrother moves in, she takes on a new task: bringing down a high school teacher (Adam Scott), an alleged child molester who fondled her stepbrother.

“Shaking down a child molester is our moral obligation,” Deutch says in the trailer during a stakeout. “Nobody’s going anywhere until we see this guy molest somebody.” As these plot lines usually go, things don’t go as planned. Judging from the alternating car chase scenes and police interactions, the dark comedy is going to have a thrilling ending.

But what seems like a mere coming-of-age film is also a meditation on how teenagers process trauma and abuse. The result is a bold comedy about “growing up in unexpected and unpredictable ways,” as the outline puts it. Find out what that means exactly come March 16 when the film hits theaters.