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2 1/2 stars (out of four)

Every frame of Mitchell Lichtenstein’s horror debut “Teeth” is crammed with symbolism. A pair of cooling towers looming over a town spit out columns of steam, in sync with the protagonist’s state of mind. Characters’ sexual choices are used as simultaneous shorthand for their personalities, histories and emotional hang-ups. Even juxtaposed ads in the background—a female form with the word “PERFECT” printed across giant breasts, above a marquee advertising banana splits—are meant to remind audiences that “Teeth” is about female exploitation and male castration.

Given how thoroughly all the subtext spells out the message, then, it seems unnecessary to make the actual text so raw, grotesque and graphic. Granted, a horror movie about vagina dentata was probably never destined to be tasteful, but Lichtenstein’s complicated, many-layered script and generally hushed art-film tone ensure that there’s more going on than cheap titillation. Had he toned down the gore, he would have been left with something fairly subtle—a sexual coming-of-age film perched neatly between satire and sexploitation. Instead, he muddies (or bloodies) the mix with graphic splatter-porn imagery.

Jess Weixler stars as Dawn, a sweet, naive, slightly prissy teenager so caught up in the abstinence movement that her wardrobe apparently consists entirely of T-shirts with slogans like “I’m waiting” (with a picture of entwined wedding rings) and “Warning: sex changes everything.” (As it turns out, the latter shirt is symbolic too.) She proudly tours area schools, preaching to her peers about abstinence, and she’s so determinedly virginal that she refuses to see PG-13 movies, lest they feature kissing. But eventually, what starts as a chaste romance with a fellow student turns into date rape, and she discovers, in grisly fashion, that her sexuality is dangerous. A little pointed classroom talk about evolution and mutation gives a scientific twist to her embodiment of the legend about vagina dentata: women with an extra, nether set of teeth.

The legend plays on castration anxiety and on qualms about female sexuality and feminine mysteries, and writer-director Lichtenstein explores those ancient fears in a modern setting, with a heavy allegorical hand. It’s no coincidence that Dawn’s date assaults her inside a cave (lipped with sharp, jagged rocks, yet), or that her health class studies the penis in detail, but censors anatomical diagrams of the vagina. In Lichtenstein’s satirical, heightened-reality version of America, the simultaneous fascination and discomfort with women’s bodies and desires finds a critical battleground in Dawn, as she learns to be comfortable with her body, and even use it as a weapon against the ill-intentioned.

Lichtenstein presents some of this with a light comic touch, laughing just a little at society’s combined prudishness and prurience, and its hypocrisies about sex. But much of the rest of the film has the dreamy, sticky nightmarish quality of “The Virgin Suicides” mixed with “Blue Velvet.” The abrupt switches into grindhouse gore are meant to be shocking, and they are, but in this carefully honed environment of awakening, they also feel pointlessly excessive.

In the same way, the symbolism sometimes overpowers the plot. A harrowing encounter with a suspiciously brutal gynecologist is so ridiculous that it can’t find either comic or dramatic footing, and Weixler’s oppressive, thuggish stepbrother hovers over her story more as a ball of Freudian malice than as a character.

And yet much of Lichtenstein’s movie is smart and even a little sweet. Weixler’s tender performance—which won her a Special Jury Prize at Cannes—puts “Teeth” on the brink of being just a charming, dark drama about teen self-discovery. It just happens to be one with far more gory, mutilated male crotches than normal.

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