Trust – review

Despite their best, repeated efforts, the cast of Friends have had unspectacular film careers. Although Marcel the monkey was pretty good in Outbreak , Trust , directed by David Schwimmer, formerly known as Friends ' Ross, might well be the best film yet to have come out of the TV sitcom. A family drama surrounding the bitter repercussions when a teenage daughter becomes the victim of an online predator, the film has the feel of something by Neil LaBute, in whose play, Some Girls , Schwimmer appeared on the London stage in 2005. Schwimmer directs with intelligence and a minimum of hysteria, deftly handling the shifts in atmosphere this creepy story requires. Although there's a whiff of "issue of the week" here, and some of its symbolism is overly neat (the father is an ad exec running a campaign that heavily sexualises youth and), it's essentially a film about trust in the systems we have to protect our children, their trust in adults' ability to support them and a teenage girl's willingness to trust a stranger's flirtations. Clive Owen has rarely been better, Catherine Keener is reliably un-Hollywood as wife and hurting mother and debutant Liana Liberato is remarkable as the foalish 14-year-old whose life is wrecked.