Η Σκοτεινή Πλευρά του Πάθους

kmarus5.0

A movie about the psychosis heterosexual women must endure for being sexually attracted to men. Basically a masterpiece.

Logan Kenny5.0

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Josh Lewis4.0

Victim of desire. In which a trashy erotic thriller plot involving a misogynistic serial killer who gruesomely "disarticulates" his victims (and leaves their body parts in various locations around NYC) is relegated to the periphery of a sad and confusing drama about a lonely English teacher and all the men in her life (a dotting younger student obsessed with John Wayne Gacy, an eccentric ex who is stalking her, an attractive detective who could very well be the killer in question), and drawn in such a stylistically fractured, blurred, and discolored fashion that when the pulpy genre elements come back into play they feel even ickier and more contradictory. Which is an impressively deliberate tightrope walk Campion performs, as they're absolutely meant to be as troubling and uncomfortable as they feel, and in service of a hazy stream-of-consciousness portrait of what it feels like to be a woman psychologically navigating a world where your pleasure comes attached (handcuffed?) to the violent power and perversions of men ("I'm scared of what I want"); a world where the skin of a lover and a dismembered body part can look eerily similar. Meg Ryan and Ruffalo have some seriously strange yet completely sensual chemistry with each other, while Dion Beebe goes crazy on all the disorienting shallow focus photography of all the sweaty and dingy New York locations, and the often subjective or fetishistic fragmented close-ups/inserts. The big climax is a little sudden and the big reveal a bit obvious (the line in the bar about a "heartbeat" kind of gives the game away) but by the time you get to the part where they have to resolve the mystery and kill the bad guy it's pretty clear how far removed the thriller plotting is from it's real interest in recontextualizing this genre from an equally fearful and horny feminist perspective. I don't think I will be forgetting Ruffalo's delivery on "no sense of cock" or the look on his face while trying to take the decapitated head in a plastic bag out of Ryan's hand, or that scene that starts with the image of a wet dismembered arm being pulled out of a laundromat machine fluidly transition into one of phone sex masturbation. What an odd and filthy movie. Hope Patrick the dog is doing ok.