Because of this title it is fixed in our brain that no matter what happens, no matter how it feels, no matter how upbeat the music, no matter how wide the smiles or how petty the arguments, this is going to get worse. It’s the moment where the evil baddie has a knife to the damsel’s throat and Indiana Jones or James Bond or Batman or Harry Potter or whoever says some iteration of “Let the girl go!” It’s that specific moment of tension stretched out across the entire film. Not just the perfect evocation of the ideal of a commodified feminine innocence and the distillation of romantic perdu but also narratively it’s a lighting-in-a-bottle kind of compelling. The Virgin Suicides is simply one of the greatest titles of all time. They are allowed to leave tonight.” The captor stands before them and says this every day. The captor stands before them and says “I see someone has blue eyes. They can see each other, but cannot know the colour of their own eyes. 100 of them have blue eyes and 100 of them have brown eyes. Known as the “Blue Eyes” puzzle, it concerns an island on which 200 mute people are trapped by a captor. Not a matter of lateral thinking or inventive trickery, but cold and brutally unforgiving logic.

There is a riddle considered to be the hardest logic puzzle in the world. I’ll be spoiling the whole movie here, so maybe go watch that first. (I have not read the book The Virgin Suicides, or any other books by Jeffrey Eugenides.

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