Searing is a great critics' word that must be used rarely and carefully. So much film stuff that's supposed to shock your soul is just special effects that may cook emotions, but doesn't leave them juicy.

There isn't one special effect in An American Crime, tonight at 9 on Showtime, unless you count the astonishing acting of Catherine Keener and Ellen Page. But the searing film, which examines depravity in the house next door, will leave you ragged.

Crime has inspired a sort of urban legend in the movie biz: So shocking and upsetting was the show at its Sundance Film Festival premiere in January 2007 that one of the hip sophisticates in the audience fainted.
Well, a man did faint, but it was because of a medical condition and not anything on the screen. Still, the movie will chill your blood.

It's the story of a 1965 case in Indianapolis. A harmless little girl was tortured, not only by the emotionally drained and drugged-up mother who was supposed to be her caretaker, but by her entire family and a gaggle of neighbor kids, too. Eventually, she died.

Much less graphic, but in the same vein as Boys Don't Cry, it examines the squirm-worthy inhuman possibilities that lurk just below the surface at the fringes of seemingly normal neighborhoods. Like that movie, it succeeds primarily because of the depth of its acting.

Page, who was 19 when she made the film in 2006, became famous with last year's Juno and her Oscar nomination. Frail and lacking confidence, Sylvia Likens, the murdered child, is almost a mirror image of the jaunty Juno, role model for teen girls everywhere. No ordinary young actor could so satisfyingly portray such divergent roles.

Keener, Oscar-nominated as Maxine in Being John Malkovich (1999), and as writer Harper Lee in Capote (2005), makes Gertrude Baniszewski's savage brutality appear almost ordinary. Strangely, and powerfully, she inspires occasional moments of sympathy.

With such stars (The West Wing's Bradley Whitford and James Franco from Spider-Man and Freaks & Geeks are here, too) and such festival buzz, An American Crime would have seemed destined for theatrical release.
But its claustrophobic cruelty wouldn't go very far to attract the masses, and actually it works more effectively on the intimate TV screen.

It's hardly a party, but it could be a devastatingly rewarding way to spend a Saturday night.

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To comment on this article, go to: http://go.philly.com/askstorm. Contact television critic Jonathan Storm at 215-854-5618 or jstorm@phillynews.com.
Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/jonathanstorm.