``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' remembers with brutal andunforgiving accuracy the hell of junior high school. Many moviesreconstruct those years as a sort of adolescent paradise; it's a shock,watching this film, to remember how cruel kids can be to one another,and how deeply the wounds cut.

I can recall today with perfect accuracy the names and faces of11-year-olds who made my life miserable. If I met them today, so manyyears later, would I forgive and forget? Not a chance. I still hatethem. Was I also cruel? Did I have my own victims? Strange, but I can'tremember...

``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' stars Heather Matarazzo in a dead-onperformance as Dawn Wiener, an unpopular seventh-grader whose glassesare wrong, whose hair is wrong, whose complexion is wrong, whose clothesare wrong, and who is as gawky and geeky as it is humanly possible tobe. The first time we see her, she's performing one of the most painfulrituals in life: walking through the school cafeteria with a loadedtray, trying to choose a table. Her objective is to sit with students asfar up the school social scale as she dares, without being rejected.

``Can I sit here?'' she asks, regarding an empty space. ``Someone barfedthere third period,'' she's informed.

Because Dawn's family name is Wiener, she is inevitably known as``Wiener Dog'' in school (I was ``Eggbert''). She is also known as``Lesbo'' and ``Stupid,'' and when she asks a classmate why she hatesher, she gets a refreshingly direct answer: ``You're ugly.'' She isn'tugly, simply unformed in that in-between way, but she projects the vibesof a potential victim, and there are always going to be sadists whoseantennae lead them straight to their targets. Inevitably, her onlyfriend in school is a boy much smaller than she is, who is regularlybeaten up and called a ``faggot.'' Do the lesbo and faggot words indicate homophobia? Notnecessarily. Kids that age are fascinated by sex and terrified by theirown ignorance, so they attack others to assert self-confidence. Anydifference at all, real or imaginary, makes someone a target. Whatqualifies as a difference? Anything you are that I am not, or that Ifear becoming.

But I'm making ``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' sound like some sortof grim sociological study, and in fact it's a funny, intenselyentertaining film: intense, because it focuses so mercilessly on thebehavior of its characters that we are forced to confront both thecomedy and the pain.

Dawn lives in a split-level house with an older brother who is anerd, and a younger sister who is a ballerina. Her parents claim theylove all of their children equally. They are lying. Her brother Mark(Matthew Faber) is focused on getting into a good college, andeverything he does is planned to enrich his application. He starts agarage band, and recruits a popular student named Steve (Eric Mabius) ashis lead singer. Steve is a mature, handsome hunk, and Dawn getsweak-kneed just looking at him. He's the kind of guy who will break awoman's heart just for the pleasure of hearing it snap, but of courseDawn's heart is far beneath his attention. Nor is he much interested inthe band (``That doesn't sound much like `Satisfaction,''' he notes,after a clarinet passage by Mark.) Dawn is very badly informed about sex, but willing to learn. Shewill essentially do anything for Steve, who can't be bothered; there isa well-written scene in which she has him alone at home and plies himwith junk food.

Meanwhile, she's tormented by Brandon (Brendan Sexton Jr.), whomakes her life miserable. Dawn is smart enough to sense or guess thatboys Brandon's age often express affection through hostility, and sheputs up with him because he's essentially the only game in school. Inone of the movie's best scenes (which works only because it is perfectlywritten, acted and understood), Brandon actually makes a date with herto ``rape'' her, and she turns up for it. Of course nothing resemblingrape takes place, although I'm not sure whether Brandon knows that.

Scene after scene, ``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' piles on itsdetails, re-creating the acute daily misery of being an unpopularadolescent and remembering, too, how resilient a girl like Dawn canbe--how self-absorbed, how hopeful, how philosophical, how enduring.

Dawn's revenge, we hope, is that someday she will be rich, famous andadmired, while the snotty little cheerleaders who persecuted her willhave been sucked into the primeval slime of the miserable lives theydeserve.

``Welcome to the Dollhouse,'' which won the grand prize at the1996 Sundance Film Festival, is a first film for its writer-director,Todd Solondz. He shows the kind of unrelenting attention to detail thatis the key to satire. It isn't the big picture that matters to a girllike Dawn, but the details: how she looks_today_in themirror, and how_this_dress looks, and what small hopefulsigns might have been sighted, or imagined, on the far emotionalhorizon. If you can see this movie without making a mental hit list ofthe kids who made your 11th year a torment, then you are kinder, orluckier, than me.