7. Child Abuse - The Perks of Being a Wallflower
One of the best teen movies in years, The Perks of Being a Wallflower was brimming with heart, intelligence and as a result managed to profoundly capture everything that the high school experience encompasses. Young Charlie is an introverted freshman who struggles to make friends and is a source of amusement for bullies at school, but that all begins to change when he meets Patrick and his sister Sam, two high-school seniors who introduce him into their expansive circle of friends. Things start to look up, though Charlie is still haunted by anxiety issues that cloud his mind whenever something stressful occurs, cemented through flashbacks to the death of his Aunt Helen when he was a young boy. At the climax of the film, as Charlie begins to go off the rails, grabbing a knife before passing out, we learn the truth. He had been sexually abused by his Aunt as a boy, and this has been repressed ever since, finally coming to the surface now, and through therapy, allowing him to come to terms with and hopefully get past this incident. Though it's a shocking revelation - and one that really feels like it comes out of nowhere - it nevertheless works within the fabric of the story, and though it was a considerable talking point of both the book and the movie, we feel it's one that's worth the controversy, further creating an emotional portrait of the stresses of trying to overcome mental anguish.