... There are deep and uneasy truths about emergent sexuality and the Darwinian atavism of the playground.

Nobody comes out of this looking pretty, and dignity – a key word in the film – is always far removed from these characters’ Darwinian struggles to survive their day without being rejected, mistreated or much, much worse.

The beauty of Welcome to the Dollhouse is its pokerfaced objectivity, which neither condescends to its pubescent victim nor romantically inflates her plight.

With this honest portrait, Solondz confronts the viewer with the strangeness of growing up made exponentially harder in a society where “special people” means the opposite.