Death and the Maiden (1994) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

This Roman Polanski film begins with a woman (Sigourney Weaver) alone in a seaside home in a unnamed Latin American country which has just rid itself of a fascist regime. She is stranded in the dark without power or phones, both of which have been knocked out by the storm which rages outside. Her home is not within sight of any other homes. The only road in sight is not a road at all, but simply a mud path which interrupts the tall grass. The only sign of civilization is a lighthouse in the distance. Inside the house, she is setting out a dinner for two people. She is calm at first, but becomes increasingly tense because the second person has not arrived. She goes to her porch, stares down the road, searching. She listens to a report on her battery-operated radio, and this angers her. A car approaches. It is not the person she was expecting. She grabs a gun, hides her body from sight, tense, frightened, vulnerable. 

It turns out that there is no immediate threat. The car in front of her house is not the one she feared. Her husband is in the passenger seat. He had a flat and was offered a lift by a passer-by.

Great beginning! Very atmospheric, sets the stage perfectly.

As a bit of time transpires, the passer-by and her husband enter the house and talk. She becomes increasingly agitated as she listens to them. She goes into the bedroom, packs some clothes and a big wad of money. We see her changing, and when we see her skin, it is obvious that she has been tortured. She sneaks out of the house, steals the stranger's car, and drives off. She takes the car to a cliff, and pushes it over, destroying it on the rocks and sinking it in the tempest-tossed sea below.

The plot thickens, as they say.

What the hell is going on? Why was she so frightened before the men arrived? Why did the presence of the stranger agitate her?

It seems that she was tortured and raped 15 years earlier, and that her torturer may or may not have been the very stranger now in her house. (The stranger is played by Ben Kingsley. Gandhi as a torturer?) The movie's title, besides reflecting her youth and peril when she was tortured, is directly derived from the fact that the rapes were accompanied by music - Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." The purpose of that torture was to get her to reveal the name of the leader of the underground. She never cracked. The plot is thickened significantly by the facts that the underground leader she never exposed was the young man who is now her husband, and that the husband now seems to have bonded a bit with the erstwhile torturer.

She is certain that the stranger was her torturer - by the voice, the smell, the idioms of his speech - so she returns to her house and confronts him, but he steadfastly denies it, and has an ironclad alibi. He was in Barcelona at the time, doing his residency after medical school. She doesn't accept his denials, and she wants revenge, or "justice". Her husband realizes that she may well be mentally ill and delusional from the long-term effects of her confinement and torture.

Power shifts between the three people. Our opinions change. The truth eventually surfaces. But what is the truth?

Death and the Maiden is a screen adaptation of a taut three-person stage play. I have described the plot as if it were a Hitchcock film, and it is a good political thriller in its own way, but be advised that it is not paced like a popcorn thriller. There is very little action. The forward momentum of the plot is very slow. If you are not in the mood to watch three people sit in a room and discuss political torture for two hours, then you need to wander over to the next aisle of the video outlet because this is not an entertainment film. The thriller and mystery elements are merely an overlay for a serious drama laced with social activism, similar to the works created by the great playwrights of the 20s and 30s.  On those terms, it is an excellent movie. Roman Polanski directed a tight script expertly, and the cast played it out quite well.