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Forty-five minutes into The Girl Next Door (no, not this one. Or this. Definitely not this. This one ), I announced to my empty apartment, “That’s enough of that,” and shut it off. And I wasn’t bored. I was unsettled, maybe even upset, and more than a little disgusted.

Disturbed.

I was actually angry about feeling this way, but I didn’t understand why until later. Talking to a friend about what I’d seen, I found myself using words like “sleazy,” “obscene,” and “exploitation.” I am not, by and large, someone who looks at films in these terms. I think that people who think that horror movie audiences identify with the killers and monsters rather than the victims and protagonists are willfully dumb, and I find the term “torture porn” outright offensive. And yet here I was, using the language of the critics. I sounded like a member of some concerned parents’ group. And that ain’t me.

I don’t watch many movies these days where much of the drama centers on torture—and make no mistake, The Girl Next Dooris a torture-ific little movie—because by and large they tend to be lazy and dull. What had drawn me to this one in the first place was the positive critical response it had generated while traveling the film festival circuit. I couldn’t figure out what it was these critics and early audiences had seen in this film, and I’m usually pretty good at that, even with movies that I hate. I found myself wondering if perhaps in my shock at what I was seeing, I’d closed myself off to the film, if I’d been so blindsided by its subject matter that I’d been unable to recognize its filmic qualities when I saw them.

So I decided to watch it again, and this time, force myself to keep it running even when every bit of me wanted to shut it off. My experience during the second viewing was wholly different than during the first.

The Girl Next Dooris the story of Meg and Susan Loughlin, two sisters who, after the death of their parents in a car accident, move in with their aunt and her sons. There, they are first emotionally and then physically abused, imprisoned and subjected to increasingly brutal acts of torture by their caretaker and, at her direction, her own children and other children in the neighborhood. If the story sounds familiar, it could be because it’s based on a Jack Ketchum novel of the same name, or because that novel is itself based on the true story of the murder of Sylvia Likens. Or maybe it’s because there’s another movie coming out later this year, An American Crime, which is also based on the murder.

We see the story through the eyes of neighborhood kid David Moran, who befriends and begins to crush on the older of the sisters shortly before things turn awful. He’s there for all of her worse moments. He bears witness to her torture and degradation, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, always with confusion and uncertainty. It’s his best friends who abuse Meg, and, more to the point, his best friends’ mother, always under the guise of discipline. Is what he’s seeing supposed to be happening? Is he supposed to be seeing it? It’s a journey into voyeurism for David, and by extension, us. This was one of my major issues when I first tried to watch the film; it wasn’t that I was totally opposed to a film about child abuse, but that the portrayal of it was so voyeuristic. It didn’t occur to me that that sense of voyeurism was deliberate, that it was one of the themes that this film was exploring.

It’s a difficult theme, and it’s a difficult film. The Girl Next Door goes deep into abuse, exploitation, lust, misogyny, mental illness, repression, and fear. It doesn’t shy away from or provide pat solutions to any of the darkness that its characters face, which is ultimately what makes it such a brave (and moral) piece of work.

It’s a story about the things that adults do to children. Not just the abusers, but all parents who don’t realize the full extent to which their kids depend on them. David is at an age when his moral compass is defined by the adults around him, adults whose own compasses fall somewhere on the spectrum between skewed and utterly fucked.The film’s darkest, most troubling scene is not one of physical violence. Rather, it occurs when young David, at his most lost, goes to his father to ask about whether or not it is okay for boys to hit girls. The father’s answer, delivered with Ward Cleaver-ish patience and wisdom, is essentially, “Never. But sometimes they deserve it.” It’s chilling, razor-sharp writing.

The movie’s got flaws, to be sure–the bookend story is heavy-handed cornball, plenty of the acting is as convincing as a high school play, and the camerawork has a flatness reminiscent of old Lifetime made-for-TV movies–but they shrink beside the overall strength of the script, the depth of Blythe Auffarth’s performance as Meg, and the dread stillness of Gregory Wilson’s direction. It’s a film to remember.

That’s ultimately what inspired me to write this, that I remembered it. Days after re-watching it, I found myself thinking about The Girl Next Door. Like, almost every spare minute. I’d realized during that second viewing that it was a much better movie than I’d given it credit for, but was now struck by the degree to which it had stuck with me. It’s not burned on the back of my eyelids, like Irreversible, say, or some vile Internet meme. I find it lingering in my chest.

I don’t know if I can totally recommend The Girl Next Door, at least not to people who struggle with material that is, well, disturbing. Maybe not even to people who do not. It’s a struggle of a film, but it is an unquestionably good struggle. If you’re feeling especially brave one night, by all means, check it out. If you don’t like what you see, I suppose you can just turn it off.