Breaking the Girls

Sara Ryan is a college student working at a bar to pay for her studies, with plans for law school ahead of her. When a classmate spots her taking money from the tip jar and gets her fired, Sara also loses her scholarship, leaving her angry and desperate. Around the same time she meets Alex Layton, a wealthy and confident new presence in her life, and the two fall into a habit of complaining about the people who have wronged them. What begins as a half-serious suggestion between them turns deadly serious once someone Sara knows turns up dead.

Jamie Babbit directed the film from a screenplay by Guinevere Turner. It arrived in 2013, thirteen years after Babbit's debut feature But I'm a Cheerleader and seven years after The Quiet, and it was followed by The Stand In in 2020 and My Lady Jane: Early Access Screening in 2024. Agnes Bruckner plays Sara opposite Madeline Zima as Alex, with Shawn Ashmore as Eric, Shanna Collins as Brooke Potter, Kate Levering as Nina Layton, and John Stockwell as David Layton.

The film runs 83 minutes. Ratings sit in middling territory: on IMDb it holds 5.4 out of 10 from 112 votes, and on TMDB it holds 5.4 out of 10 from 112 votes, while critics' reviews collected on Rotten Tomatoes average 4.7 out of 10 from 10 reviews.