Set at California’s nonexistent Mercy College, a twilight zone of contrivance where students talk in an odd patois into which chunks of oldspeak and literariness have fallen ("This is rich"; "I’ve got a little Gregor Samsa thing going here"), this is Neil LaBute’s adaptation of his play. The characters, like the experience of watching the film, can be described only within quotes: "sophisticated, amoral" art student Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) picks up "geeky" lit major Adam (Paul Rudd) and transforms him by degrees into a "cool dude" — a process that comes to seem more and more "sinister" as it becomes clear that Evelyn has a "hidden agenda." The obsessive sterility of LaBute’s mise-en-scène, in which background detail is all but absent, forces attention on the games of condescension and provocation in his end-to-end two-person dialogues (in which Adam’s two friends, played by Gretchen Mol and Fred Weller, also take part). It would seem we’re expected to react with mounting discomfort and fascination, though boredom, laced with a sporting curiosity about what kind of unpleasantness impends, is just as appropriate a response to the stunted souls who haunt LaBute’s campus. (96 minutes)