Spoiler trigger warnings: grooming and rape of a very young teenage girl; racism; lynching; a white woman falsely accuses a black man of rape.

My brain is melting a little bit because of this film.

On the one hand, I want to scream at it for being so exploitative and uncomfortable. It's just so scuzzy when it comes to the plot and, possibly, the way it was made.

On the other hand, it could also be Buñuel's forgotten English-language masterpiece? It features no surrealism, the acting is so strong and the Southern Gothic plot offers so much ambiguity.

(SPOILER: one man rapes Evvie, a girl so isolated, she knows nothing about sex; another one baptizes her in water without explaining first what he's going to do. And Buñuel seem to show both acts as nonconsensual violations. END OF SPOILER)

The titles this film is known as show all the contrasts well. The English title is The Young One, referring to Evvie, the orphan girl at the center of the plot. But I also know this film under the deceptively poetic Polish title Dziewczyna z wyspy (The Girl from the Island). It was also released as White Trash in the US and Island of Shame in the UK...

Why do I call the way it was made as possibly scuzzy? The fact that a non-professional actress, Key Meersman, plays the teenage girl who is groomed and sexually assaulted, and I cannot find the actress's actual age, makes me very suspicious. Her performance is awesome but how old was she when she was shooting this film???

Considering I've seen Land Without Bread (1933)(because both films are in the first edition of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book), where the filmmakers' real-life animal cruelty was used to condemn imaginary animal cruelty of the real-life impoverished villagers (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/sep/09/books.guardianreview)... I have no hope that early Buñuel's films kept any moral standards. But of course I wish to be wrong here.

Land Without Bread is still in the newest edition of the book while The Young One is not. I think both should be eventually removed. But I also think this one shouldn't be forgotten. The way The Young One mixes discussion on consent, racism and hypocrisy, only to end in an extremely cynical finale, is certainly something else. If you like the Southern Gothic genre (I do), you can give it a try. Just be mentally prepared to be disturbed.