The Comfort of Strangers

A hard to rate erotic horror. It's almost something great, but it just can't quite pull greatness off. The scenery is beautiful, the concept is interesting, the dialogue is great, and the acting is wonderful. The editing, plotting and pacing, however, is where the film fails. It has several great setups and promises that it just never really delivers on. It has great atmosphere, but it ends up being just that, atmosphere without the needed substance to bring it together. Ultimately, forgettable.

Haunting, subtly creepy and atmospheric tale gets better and better as it goes along, helped by brilliantly bizarre performances from Walken and a devilish Mirren, and Schrader's contained, claustrophobic direction. Everett is the one miscast weak link, but Richardson is fine, and the elusive, dreamy nature of proceedings is sustained beautifully until the end credits.

Haunting film with not much of a plot. Nice setting. Spends too much time telling us how beautiful Rupert Everett was. Maybe some more setup or explanation (or lack thereof) would have been more substantial. Or end the movie at the climax. Audio sounded distant in my BFI blu-ray. Fav scene: camera slowly following the hallway.

The path to death has what should be obvious markers along the way--but the lost couple at the center of this story is so lost they end up ignoring said markers in the spirit of exploration or a misdirected neighborliness. I expect it's largely the former--they seem obsessed with sex and each other's beauty, prioritizing these concerns over the familial and relational. In some ways, this feels like a cousin to some of the 80's horror (Jason, Freddy) that punishes the promiscuous.

Fairly bloodless take on potentially explosive material. Richardson and Everett are bland and struggle to sustain interest until Walken and Mirren appear, and even then their weak performances ensure that any tension is sucked right out of their awkward encounters. Visually it's superior to most Schrader films, but it's a style that tends towards mannerism, and while it improves in the final act as dark desires become increasingly manifest, the impact is thwarted by a stuffy sense of restraint.

3 brilliant writers, some of the finest thespians working, lensed and scored by 2 Italian masters creating some of their finest work, edited by De Palma's man. Yet somehow, of all these distinctive voices, Pinter's resonates most. Though he's seemingly just adapting a novel, it's his economically stylized ear ridding the exposition of certainty and the characters of transparency, which is just right for a psychothriller so languid and lush that its true nature is only revealed at the very end.

A good script and first rate actors combine for a haunting languid film, Venice is a perfect choice of setting echoing Don't Look Now.

Score based on distant memory.