: Intimate Strangers
This wasn’t as wicked as I hoped. The concept sounded amazing: a woman mistakes a tax attorney for her new psychiatrist (she goes into the wrong office and he assumes she’s a tax client) and spills her guts to him. By the time he realizes the mistake, he’s in over his head. Should he tell her? How will she react? She wants a regular session and he agrees, unsure what else to do.
Unfortunately, the scam is uncovered right away. I had figured the fake psychiatrist thing would go on for a long time, building suspense as the woman reveals more and more intimate information. Thus the film goes from being about complex mind games to being a long therapy session. In that regard it’s still interesting — the woman is mysterious and doesn’t reveal everything all at once and we’re not sure how much of what she says is factual — but it is talky and slow. Talky would have been fine if there was the undercurrent of the fake psychiatrist thing behind everything, but without that it’s really just eavesdropping on a woman and her therapist.
There is the intriguing question of why the woman continues to have therapy sessions with the man even though she knows he’s not a doctor. And of course the man is obviously falling in love with the girl. Those things make the film interesting, but it never quite lives up to its potential. I did like the ending, in which we find that the therapy has helped each of them heal. Good but not great.
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