Welcome to the Dollhouse

Name: Welcome to the Dollhouse
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2021-01-01

Documentary20m

🍅94%

🍅

94%

Tomatometer

🍿

86%

Popcornmeter

Storyline

A dive into the societal rules and expectations of the celebration of women’s bodies and their use to show love and power. The Disdress Dolls shimmy, shake, and strip across the stage, challenging concepts of strength and femininity by offering a vulnerable portrait of themselves and playful and macabre world.

Details

DirectorElizabeth Miller-Derstine

ReleasedJan 1, 2021

StatusReleased

Original languageEnglish

Budget

Reviews

8 reviews · 7 critics

7 fresh · 0 rotten

Critics consensus

“An outstanding sophomore feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse sees writer-director Todd Solondz mining suburban teen angst for black, biting comedy.”

94% TomatometerRotten Tomatoes

Kevin Maher

RTThe Times (UK)Mar 10, 2023

... There are deep and uneasy truths about emergent sexuality and the Darwinian atavism of the playground.

Anton Bitel

RTLittle White LiesMar 4, 2023

Nobody comes out of this looking pretty, and dignity – a key word in the film – is always far removed from these characters’ Darwinian struggles to survive their day without being rejected, mistreated or much, much worse.

David Ansen

RTNewsweekFeb 27, 2018

The beauty of Welcome to the Dollhouse is its pokerfaced objectivity, which neither condescends to its pubescent victim nor romantically inflates her plight.

Chelsea Jones

RTScreen SlateAug 26, 2026

With this honest portrait, Solondz confronts the viewer with the strangeness of growing up made exponentially harder in a society where “special people” means the opposite.