After moving to the affluent, gated community of Camelot Gardens, 10-year-old Devon Stockard forms a friendship with the neighborhood’s 21-year-old landscaper Trent Burns, though the innocent platonic connection scandalizes the neighborhood, due to the clear differences between their age and social class.
The take
Adults and kids can be friends, but there’s obviously a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This line is why most people would look at a friendship like this and automatically assume terrible things, but Lawn Dogs depicts one such connection in such a way that it’s clear how easy and disproportionate these assumptions are made for marginalized and less powerful people, over the affluent sociopaths that can and have gotten away with the accusations they lobby against others. The fairy tale ending, and of course, the disgusting behavior done by the rich guys, might turn some viewers off from the movie, but there’s also something genuine with the way screenwriter Naomi Wallace depicts a girl with a literally different heart who just wants to befriend someone real.