Speak Movie Review

Freshman high-school student Melinda “Kristen Stewart” has refused to speak ever since she called the cops on a popular summer party. With her old friends snubbing her for being a rat, and her parents “Elizabeth Perkins, D.B. Sweeney” too busy to notice her troubles, she folds into herself, trying to hide her secret: that star senior Andy “Eric Lively” raped her at the party. But Melinda does manage to find solace in her art class headed by Mr. Freeman “Steve Zahn”.^[1]

I really liked this movie. I think it was a pretty accurate adaptation from the book, and the actors did great jobs at depicting the different characters and their roles in the story. Kristen Stewart did an amazing job playing Melinda, especially with how complex Melinda is as a character.

I appreciate the flashback scenes to the night of the party that they include in this movie. They reveal what happened that night scene by scene, only showing us certain events from that night after we’ve seen specific scenes from the main story to highlight the effects of Melinda being harassed. I also appreciate how they didn’t make the scene too graphic, mirroring the description of these events in the novel and the lack of detail in them. This is also realistic to how survivors of this kind of trauma react, blocking out specific details and trying to forget the experience entirely.

I liked how they included narration over the scenes to get Melinda’s point of view across. She hardly talks in the novel, and you can only understand how she feels in the situations she is in by her internal dialogue, which is hard to incorporate into movie format without it sounding repetitive or annoying. They get around this by only adding narration when necessary to get Melinda’s thoughts across, and using her facial expressions or body language to communicate those feelings in other scenes. I think they did a good job at conveying Melinda’s feelings effectively, while

keeping the drama and life events center-stage.

I also liked how they depicted Melinda’s old friends and acquaintances in the movie. In the book, we are only briefly introduced to these characters, and the information we get is given to us through Melinda’s own internal monologue, which can be unreliable at times. In the book, Melinda often believes everyone around her hates her, and has an overall pessimistic view on people’s intentions, which, although realistic, especially with the trauma that Melinda had endured at that party, definitely clouds her judgment of her peers. In the movie, however, we are directly shown Melinda’s classmates, and while the majority of them are rude and making fun of her, many people, some of her old friends specifically, look worried about Melinda, and are never shown to dislike her directly. This adds a more positive or hopeful aspect to the movie that isn’t present in the book, or atleast not in a majority of its chapters.

Heather, Melinda’s new friend at the beginning of her 9^th grade year, is one of the more complex characters in this book; initially, she is the example of how Melinda “should” be, and highlights the contrast between the two of them. Heather is new to their school, and very excited to finally be in high school. She is very optimistic about her freshman year and tries to join numerous different clubs and organizations, while Melinda couldn’t care less about participating in anything and is extremely pessimistic about high school.

This friendship, realistically, didn’t last the full film, and we see how Heather begins to distance herself from Melinda, eventually unfriending her, after hearing about her reputation and how most people don’t like her. Heather has been striving for popularity, and it made sense story-wise that she would eventually unfriend Melinda. However, she eventually visits Melinda’s house and tries to ask her for help in a situation she is in with one of her cliques, with Melinda getting mad at her and yelling about how she treated her. This scene really shows how Melinda has changed, if but slightly, since the beginning of the movie, leading up to the ending and how she speaks out against Andy.

Overall, Speak is a great movie and book for spreading awareness about sexual assault in youth, and mental health issues in general. I recommend that everybody reading this atleast watch the Speak movie, and see what it has to offer.

1. yusufpiskin, Speak. Directed by Jessica Sharzer, IMDb, IMDb.com, 2004, imdb.com. Accessed 9 June 2026.