Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996) on Netflix
Dawn Wiener, a seventh-grader in suburban New Jersey, wants to be liked. Her classmates bully her, her parents favor her younger sister, and Brandon McCarthy threatens her.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.3/1040,971 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
Trailer
Plot summary
At Benjamin Franklin Junior High, Dawn Wiener is a social outcast. Classmates call her Wiener Dog and cover her locker in graffiti. At home in suburban New Jersey, her mother dotes on her younger sister Missy, a ballet dancer, and her father sides with her mother; her older brother Mark focuses on his garage band and college plans. Dawn's only friend is Ralphy, a sixth-grade boy who shares her backyard clubhouse. She quietly seeks the attention of Brandon McCarthy, a bully who threatens her. When Mark recruits popular classmate Steve Rodgers to play in his band, Dawn sets her sights on Steve as a boyfriend.
In these lists: The Best Movies of 1996, 30 Years Later
Cast
- Daria Kalininaas Missy Wiener
- Dimitri DeFrescoas Ralphy (as Dimitri Iervolino)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and launched the careers of Todd Solondz, Heather Matarazzo and Brendan Sexton III.
- The film's working title was Faggots and Retards, and Dawn's brother and father turn up again in Solondz's Palindromes as well as in Life During Wartime, released in 2009.
- Dawn reappears in two of Solondz's other films, Palindromes (2004) and Wiener-Dog (2016), but those films run on alternate timelines and she encounters two different fates in them.
