The sexy excesses of Where the Truth Lies, the bloodshed in A History of Violence and the live wire that is Water have made for a full season of controversial films this fall.

Deepa Mehta’s latest arrives in theaters this month with a 14A rating in Ontario and warnings for both ‘disturbing content’ and its ‘mature theme.’ Not an easy decision to make, says ratings boss Janet Robinson, because many of the unpleasant things that occur in Water fall into to the murkiest category by which movies are rated in Ontario.

‘Everything was implied,’ she says. A child rape. A suicide. Substance abuse. ‘This film was put up to 14A because the psychological impact is very disturbing. The rest of the film was purely PG.’

There is ‘very little language,’ for example, just ‘whore, bitch and ass.’

The Ontario Film Review Board, of which Robinson is chairperson, rates films based on language, nudity, sexual content, horror and psychological impact. Psych is the trickiest, she says.

‘Psychological is one of those things that you can’t say is black or white. It’s one of those grey things based on how we were brought up, how we think.’

It can also be a key element in decisions. Earlier this year the family-friendly March of the Penguins was slapped with a PG rating because of a bloodless but unsettling scene in which sea lions attack the doc’s unfortunate stars. Board members agonized over the sequence and its significance, says Robinson, although the rating was later appealed and bumped down to G.

Samuel L. Jackson’s Coach Carter was also rated 14A because of its strong language and drug use, but, again on appeal, was moved down to PG because of its redeeming message.

Scenes that are frightening or intense, ‘particularly to younger viewers,’ may lead to a 14A rating under psych, according to the OFRB guidelines. It takes ‘intense and compelling terror, acts of degradation, threats of violence, and continuous acts of non-extreme violence’ to get an R.

‘We take the movie as a whole – what’s the message that comes across?’ says Robinson. Films are reviewed and rated by two board members, drawn from a pool of 15.

In the case of Water – about women and children who are forced into prostitution in 1930s India – certain scenes and its overall mood earned a 14A, which bars children under that age unless they arrive on the arm of a grown-up.

And yet, curiously, the mood and message of Water seems to have had the opposite effect in Alberta, where it is rated PG.

‘The underlying values, the underlying intent was a mitigating factor. It’s pretty clear no one is condoning what was happening in the film,’ says Sharon McCann, manager of Alberta’s Film Classification Board. Water is also PG in B.C. and Nova Scotia.

McCann notes, however, that comparisons between provinces might be ‘apples and oranges’ because of their different systems.

The ratings aren’t likely to affect Water’s play in theaters. Mehta, most likely, does not have a great many preteen fans, and Tom Alexander at Mongrel Media says the distrib is entirely happy with the 14A.

The OFRB is often criticized for being too strict, and its governing legislation was struck down last year when a long court battle concluded that the organization’s power to ban movies violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And yet the board seems to have gone easy on some of this season’s most controversial films.

Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies was hit with the rare and highly restrictive NC-17 rating in the U.S., but got off with an 18A in the director’s home province – open to adults and children in the company of an adult. The sex and bloodshed in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence got the same rating, albeit with a long list of warnings. It is rated R is the States.

‘I didn’t see either one of them, but… here in Canada we are a little bit more lenient on the sexual aspects of a film and harder on the violence,’ says Robinson. ‘In the States, especially in the Bible belt, if you happen to see a breast they have an absolute fit.

‘My favorite line here is, ‘We all have sex but we’re not all violent.’ The 18A is a perfectly logical category for both of them.’

B.C. and Alberta seem to agree. Both provinces gave both films the same rating.