Thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot details we can't reveal in our review.
Seriously, I’m not kidding about that eyeliner thing. Watch a Beautiful Creatures trailer sometime and watch the progression of Englert’s clothing from dowdy to gothy, and her makeup’s progression from “washed-out, traumatized Bella in Twilight” to “raccoon.”
That aside… in the end, Englert chooses to Claim herself and balance between Light and Dark, even though the movie has repeated over and over that she can’t possibly make her own choice. Then, even though she’s spent the entire movie in near-hysterics over the idea of possibly being forced against her will to turn evil… she deliberately rips the soul out of her groveling, terrified mother, which seems pretty fundamentally evil. And to top it all off, she chooses to sacrifice her relationship with Ehrenreich by erasing his memory for his own good, as the only way the magic will let her make her choice… but then he remembers her anyway, and the film takes that back as well. There are arguments to be made that the magic is actually behaving consistently—that Englert’s evil act with Thompson is “balanced” by her good act in letting Rossum go, or that Irons’ sacrifice was the necessary one for the magic to work. But the movie handles most of its developments so clumsily and with so little explanation that it’s never clear what’s going on, and its exploitation of positive feelings isn’t enough to justify its casual disregard for its own rules.