The Loved Ones
The Loved Ones is a 2009 French and Australian slasher film directed by Sean Byrne.
An Australian teenager says no to a girl for the school dance, and she holds her own dance instead.
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Brent turns down Lola for the end-of-year formal. Lola and her father abduct him, dress him for a private dance in their kitchen, and work through an evening of increasingly personal cruelty.
Sean Byrne made a genuine oddity: a torture film that is also a pitch-black comedy about adolescent rejection, with a pink-themed home-made prom staged in a suburban kitchen while a second, real dance happens elsewhere.
Robin McLeavy plays Lola as a giggling, needy monster and the father's devotion to her is the most disturbing thing in it.
It is extremely violent and genuinely funny, which is a hard combination, and it has a real emotional undercurrent about grief and loneliness running beneath the salt and the drill.
It won audience awards on the festival circuit and took years to get a release, which is the standard fate of films this hard to categorise.
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Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
Australia
Canada
Germany
UK
USA
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
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