The trailer for writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth — the Sundance-minted flick about a high school student (Jess Weixler) who “experiences both the pitfalls and the power of being a living example of the
vagina dentata myth” — is a great… well, effective, let’s say, evocation of anxiety and mood, particularly its first minute, with Weixler nervously settling into her doctor’s examination chair.

But I’ve been putting off seeing this film, and not only because it’ll likely have me grabbing my junk for 90 minutes or so thereafter. It just seems a bit precious, this concept, and the trailer doesn’t answer one way or another the big, lurking question — does Teeth have anything going for it other than the cheeky-naughty factor at its core? Otherwise it could be this year’s Hard Candy — a shrewdly packaged but essentially pat, unconvincingly facile narrative reversal wrapped up in profundity’s clothing.