A revisionist take on the paranoia thriller with this story of a Southern California housewife who suddenly falls victim to an inexplicable, apparently incurable illness.

toqtaqiya2

Made with the kind of analytic intelligence that was the signature of Stanley Kubrick, but also with a tenderness that Kubrick seldom permitted, Safe is an intellectual horror film. Carol (Julianne Moore) is afflicted with environmental illness. It is a syndrome which many in the medical establishment refuse to recognize; those who do consider its sufferers, most of them women, to be the canaries of the 21st century. Keeping Carol at a distance - a fragile, almost paralysed figure in a chill, repressive environment - director Todd Haynes nevertheless locates the film within her subjectivity. Rather than alienating us from her, the measured, wide-angle, hyper-real mise-en-scene becomes an expression of the alienation she experiences. As her health deteriorates, we realize that everything in her environment - which is not very different from our own - is potentially lethal. The tension between identification and remove gives the film great gravity. Every frame seems charged with the push-pull of desire and loathing. Safe has the most conventional surface of all Haynes's films, but it makes the greatest demand on viewers. It would be wrong to look for the film's meaning in the words of the affable guru of Wrenwood. Nothing could be further from Haynes's position than the New Age prescriptions. 'Do you smell the fumes?' is the inscription on a flyer that catches Carol's eye. Safe suggests that we are all vulnerable to the fumes; the rest is up to us.

score 9/10

toqtaqiya2 8 November 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2335910/