The Miseducation of Cameron Post review: Unfolds like a junior version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

The Miseducation Of Cameron Post is a sad and funny coming-of-age drama in which the heroine undergoes “gay conversion therapy”. This pseudoscience is shown as both comic and horrific. The God-fearing parents and teachers in the film simply cannot cope with the idea that their teenage sons and daughters might be suffering from “same sex attraction”. SSA, as they abbreviate it, is treated as a mental illness – one that can be cured with a bit of shock treatment. It is also seen as evil, an affront against the Holy Bible.

The film unfolds like a junior version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) is the equivalent of the Jack Nicholson character slung into an asylum in Milos Forman’s masterpiece. Her indiscretion here is to have made out with another girl in the back of a car during a high school dance. To punish and cure her, she is sent straight off to God’s Promise, a remote rural institution run along the lines of a reform school by the Nurse Ratched-like Dr Lydia March (Jennifer Ehle). Here, young men and women undergo intensive counselling and emotional blackmail to swing them back onto the heterosexual path.

Director Desiree Akhavan, who adapted the film from Emily M Danforth’s novel, strikes a delicate balance between satire and polemic. She is helped by a sly and affecting performance from Moretz as the young heroine who can’t quite believe what is happening to her. Cameron’s attitude towards God’s Promise is one of bemusement. She can see the absolute bad faith of Dr March and her brother (who claims to have been “cured”). She is fascinated and even amused by what is going on around her. Patients are told that their condition was caused by “too much masculine bonding with dad over football” or an infatuation with a sports coach or an inappropriate obsession with a fellow member of the church choir. Cameron, though, isn’t just there as an observer. She is also one of the patients, or “disciples” as they are called. There is nothing funny about it when fellow inmates try to commit suicide or mutilate their genitals in self-disgust.

In her own quiet way, Cameron is a natural-born rebel. She takes drugs, hangs out with a couple of other young dissident types, and maintains an independent spirit. Her growing guilt, though, is obvious. We see her early on in a dream sequence imagining she is watching Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts, a classic 1980s lesbian movie, with her girlfriend, and being caught in flagrante. She is attacked about everything from her name (“Cameron” is considered masculine and unbecoming) to her chequered past. The denouement here is predictable but director Akhavan is both perceptive and witty in her account of the challenges facing the gay and lesbian teenagers. Their problem isn’t anything to do with gender or sexuality. It lies in dealing with a conservative, ultra-religious society in which any hint of difference or dissent is instantly suppressed.