The Rules of Attraction Unleashed James Van Der Beek — The Bret Easton Ellis Gem We Overlooked

Written off in 2002, The Rules of Attraction quietly launched careers—and features a blistering, against‑type James Van Der Beek in a criminally underrated Bret Easton Ellis adaptation.

James Van Der Beek never got enough credit for his film work, which is wild when you look at how hard he went for The Rules of Attraction. If you only know him from the nice-guy lane on TV, buckle up — this one is sharp, nasty, funny, and kind of fearless.

What this movie is doing

Based on Bret Easton Ellis's 1987 novel, The Rules of Attraction follows a tangle of wealthy, messy college kids at a New Hampshire liberal arts school. Van Der Beek plays Sean Bateman, the campus drug dealer and, yes, the younger brother of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman — which tells you plenty about his moral compass. Sean fixates on taking the virginity of freshman Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon), while circling her bisexual ex, Paul (Ian Somerhalder), and Lauren's chaos-friendly roommate, Lara (Jessica Biel). No lessons. No hand-holding. Just a glossy window into bad behavior.

Roger Avary swings for the fences

Director Roger Avary came into this off Killing Zoe, and his Tarantino-adjacent Video Archives cred gave this little indie real heat at the time. The finished film didn’t land with critics back then and it flopped financially, but Ellis himself loved it. Avary kept working (writing on Silent Hill and Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf), then served time for manslaughter after a tragic incident. Since getting out, he’s rebuilt with the Video Archives Podcast and is now pushing into a slate of AI-driven features that already has people talking — loudly.

Why this might be the best Ellis adaptation

Two films truly capture Ellis’s vibe on screen: Mary Harron's American Psycho and this. Avary doesn’t moralize or soften anything. He nails the novel’s cool, detached tone and the late-80s texture without turning it into a costume party. The film originally got slapped with an NC-17, largely thanks to sequences like a harrowing suicide scene set to Harry Nilsson's "Without You." Trims brought it down to an R, but the sting remains.

Cast against type, and loving it

• James Van Der Beek as Sean Bateman: a cold-blooded antihero a galaxy away from his teen-TV persona
• Shannyn Sossamon as Lauren: the naive freshman target of Sean's obsession
• Ian Somerhalder as Paul: a smooth, complicated ex who later became a teen idol on The Vampire Diaries
• Jessica Biel as Lara: a risk-taking turn that helped pivot her into a bolder film career beyond 7th Heaven
• Kip Pardue as Victor: a hedonistic model whose European detour became a whole secret movie (more on that in a second)

The soundtrack absolutely understands the assignment

Erasure, The Cure, Love and Rockets, and Public Image Ltd. do a lot of heavy lifting, with Tomandandy’s score threading it all together. It’s needle-drop heaven without feeling like a jukebox. Avary threads 1987 through the vibe and the music rather than banging you over the head with nostalgia.

Box office faceplant, cult-life after

The movie made about $11 million worldwide on a reported $4 million budget. The theatrical run underwhelmed, but it found a second life on DVD — especially on campuses — and kept quietly gathering fans who realized Van Der Beek could play characters with knives for souls.

The wild almost-sequel, and the movie you might never see

Avary wanted to follow this with Ellis’s Glamorama, continuing threads from this film with Pardue’s character, Victor Johnson. That never happened, but he did shoot a spinoff called Glitterati using Victor’s Europe footage. It exists, it has screened privately, and it will probably never get a proper release. As Ellis put it years ago:

"For many legal reasons, it will never see the light of day. You can't really show Glitterati in public, it's not possible. There are a lot of people who would be very upset. I don't even know if they got permission from a lot of the people in it, which might be a big problem — why it's only shown privately."

Where to watch

The Rules of Attraction is currently streaming on Prime Video in the U.S. and on the free CTV app in Canada. It’s also available to buy digitally.

The bottom line

This is Roger Avary’s sharpest film and one of the few Ellis adaptations that actually feels like Ellis. The fact that James Van Der Beek burns this hot in it is reason enough to queue it up. Underrated then, still stinging now.