Other Titles • Death and the Maiden • La Jeune Fille Et La Mort
Synopses for Death and the Maiden (1994)
1.
Roman Polanski’s suspenseful drama is based on a play by Ariel Dorfman, who also cowrote the screenplay. The movie takes place in an unspecified South American country after the recent fall of the dictatorship. Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) is a former political activist and torture victim. Her husband, Gerardo (Stuart Wilson), a respected lawyer, has just been appointed to head a commission on human rights violations under the old regime, though Paulina, suffering from severe psychological trauma ever since her arrest, objects to what she perceives as a sham investigation. The couple receives an unexpected visitor one stormy night when an affable stranger, Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), drops Gerardo off at the Escobars’ isolated house after his car breaks down. Paulina believes she recognizes the man’s voice as belonging to the doctor who supervised her torture and raped her on several occasions while she was blindfolded and strapped to a table. In spite of her husband’s objections, she decides to take Miranda prisoner, threatening him with a gun, determined to get a taped confession from him at any cost. Under Polanski’s keen direction, Dorfman’s three-character play is successfully transformed into a captivating film that loses neither dramatic tension nor momentum along the way.
(42 votes)
2.
Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden, a film adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's stunning play about the legacy of torture, has more in common with the director's first film, Knife in the Water (with all the latter's unnerving ambiguities about power, sexual transgression and confused alliances among three people) than a straightforward political parable. Sigourney Weaver (a bit underwhelming in this role, but good overall) plays a former political prisoner in an unnamed South American country that has turned democratic. She is married to a government official (fine work by Stuart Wilson) heading up official inquiries into the practice of torture under the former regime. Still shattered by her experience, Weaver's character seeks safe haven in closets of the cliff-top house she shares with her husband. But when her other half returns home with a seemingly nice fellow (a brilliant Ben Kingsley), she believes she recognises the stranger as the interrogator who raped her repeatedly in prison. She violently takes him hostage, and what ensues is a hurricane of fury and confusion, as Kingsley's terrified character denies all accusations, Wilson's guilt-ridden spouse can't decide whom to defend and Weaver turns her psychosexual rage into a weapon of humiliation. Dorfman adapted the screenplay himself, but there's no question that Polanski is leading us down the familiar path of human betrayal and terror that he crossed in such films as Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion and Bitter Moon. At times stunning in its bluntness and compelling to the last, Death and the Maiden literally takes us to the edge of oblivion where--in Polanski's films--the hardest truths always seem to fall into a heretofore unknown perspective.--Tom Keogh, Amazon.com
(34 votes)
3.
Tonight, mercy will be buried with the past.
From Academy Award-winning director Roman Polanski (The Pianist, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, Bitter Moon) comes a shocking tale of redemption and revenge. Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley and Stuart Wilson star in this critically acclaimed psychological thriller about a woman's desperate search for justice-at any price. Fifteen years ago, Paulina Escobar had her life shattered when she was taken prisoner and tortured by a sadistic doctor. Now, through a chance encounter, she may have found the man responsible for her nightmares and tonight he's going to pay. But how far will she go to get even? And how can she be sure, after so many years, she has found the right man?
(23 votes)
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