Curtis Hanson (Bedroom Window, Bad Influence), availing himself again of the Hitchcockian formula of ruffled complacency, develops the creepy situation of a happy family infiltrated by an undeclared enemy with an undisclosed (even to us) plan of action. To get into that situation, as into many another fruitful suspense situation, we must come through some choppy waters. These include some fortuitous dovetailings of incident and some dutiful nods in the direction of motive and psychology: a gynecologist, accused of molestation in the examining room, obligingly shoots himself; his widow, pregnant herself at the time, miscarries as a result, blames her troubles on the patient who first lodged the charges (corroborated by others), and obtains employment from said patient as a nanny to her newborn son. Neat, possibly too neat, but soon more than neat. And Hanson is not in too big a rush to get full measure from the enactment of our darkest suspicions about male gynecologists: the melted-butter bedside manner, the squirmy detail of the discreetly slipped-off rubber glove before the pelvic exam, etc. What ultimately justifies and offsets the early bumpiness is the long stretch of smooth sailing and subtle acceleration en route to (but not necessarily including) the final Niagara: the unmasked and expelled avenger returning to the scene after nightfall. Till then, the sense of peril gets notched up a degree at a time, possibly a few degrees at once when the schemer throws a private tantrum in a restroom stall or wins favor with the elder daughter by putting down a schoolyard bully. And the peripheral details -- the heroine's asthma, her green thumb, the home-improvement projects, the best friends -- are sketched in with an almost novelistic fullness and unhurriedness. The way in which these are systematically pulled in from the periphery and made into integral parts of the revenge plot signals a particular genre of novel, and a particularly insidious specimen of it. Annabella Sciorra, Rebecca De Mornay, Ernie Hudson. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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