Sort of a kinky thriller, which is to say definitely kinky but only sort of a thriller, re-enacting the ostensibly “true events” of a self-mutilating married woman finding on the Internet a compatible sadist willing for a fee to put her out of her misery. Director Johan Renck, rather than pander to the basest tastes, takes the high road of nonlinearity and disjunction, obliqueness and obscurity, coyness and concealment, and (courtesy of the esteemed cinematographer Christopher Doyle) an unembraceable image of frosty white and frozen blue. Somehow one doubts that the people in real life looked much like Maria Bello, Jason Patric, and Rufus Sewell, the last of whom is quite chilling as the uninterested husband, uninterested anyway in anything but golf. With Amy Brenneman. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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