“A funny, intensely entertaining film … [Solondz] shows the kind of unrelenting attention to detail that is the key to satire … If you can see this movie without making a mental hit list of the kids who made your eleventh year a torment, then you are kinder, or luckier, than me.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Junior high is hell—Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo) can attest. Tormented by her classmates and targeted by aghast teachers whenever she retaliates, the seventh-grader at the centre of American provocateur Todd Solondz’s Sundance sensation is an underdog—“Wienerdog”—of the lowest order. The situation is no better at home, where a doted-on little sister and college-résumé-obsessed older brother position Dawn as the family outcast. Crushing on a hunky high schooler who joins her brother’s band, the bespectacled misfit sets a cringy seduction plan in motion. A bully’s intensifying sexual threats, meanwhile, take an unexpectedly tender turn. Solondz’s breakthrough comedy, a benchmark of ​’90s indie Americana, is a provocatively sanguine (and un-PC) portrait of preadolescent humiliation, with a perfectly cast Matarazzo as a winningly awkward ​“loser” defiant in her indignation and unsinkable self-assurance. Arguably the most accessible, and successful, work in Solondz’s polarizing cinema of suburbia, Welcome to the Dollhouse turns 30 this year.

Grand Jury Prize
Sundance 1996

“A stark, often funny, always poignant comedy … Dollhouse offers unflinching realism, meticulous attention to detail, and deliciously wicked humor.”

Emanuel Levy, Variety

“Mordantly hilarious … Welcome to the Dollhouse displays wrenching emotional acuity beneath a veneer of devilishly funny surface details.”

Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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