: Death and the Maiden
Director: Roman Polanski
I’ve been wanting to see this for a long time and finally rented the DVD. It’s set in a nameless South American country where an American woman and her husband, who live in a rural area, meet a man on a stormy night when the electricity is out, and she thinks he’s the doctor who tortured her years earlier. She holds him at gunpoint, determined to get the truth out of him. But is he really the guy? She was blindfolded and it was many years ago. She swears she recognizes his voice, but she’s not exactly stable. The debate is what makes the story interesting. This apparently is based on a play and it has that feel to it: it’s claustrophic with the remote house the main set and the three characters as the main actors. It’s talky, but the dialog is above average. With such a gimmicky premise I got a little tired of the “did he or didn’t he” games by the end, and the vagueness of the politics of the unnamed country made for a vague conflict, but it’s still an interesting experiment and worth seeing.
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