Safe (1995) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

This is a rare American movie made in the style and atmosphere of the Northern Europeans. It is paced slowly, with few cuts. People contemplate on camera. There are long sequences filmed with a single camera far from the action, in which people speak to each other in hollow voices. The background music is either missing or outright creepy. It is unrelentingly depressing from beginning to end. This is all intentional, a style employed by the director to create a certain chilling, hopeless atmosphere. Imagine the movie Ingmar Bergman would make if he were a young American. 

It is essentially a two-act play. 

In the first half, an upper middle class homemaker starts to become a victim of a mysterious unexplained breakdown of her immune system, which cannot be medically pinpointed, but which is eventually "diagnosed" as environmental sickness - she becomes convinced that she's allergic to the 20th century. The film portrays the current health of mankind as precarious, and our lives as shallow and unrewarding. 

In other words, the first half tells us that the unscrupulous, greedy, short-sighted forces are killing us with wanton chemical poisoning and wastefulness, and the second half tells us that other unscrupulous, greedy forces are capitalizing on our fears and killing our souls as well. Both halves of the film imply that none of it matters anyway, because our shallow, greedy, unexamined lives are not really worth living, and our spiritually bereft souls are really not worth holding on to without a major overhaul. 

In a way, her disease was the only route she had to any self-awareness, but then she could only define herself in terms of the disease.

So it's basically one of those uplifting, feel-good movie experiences.

Bravo to Julianne Moore for taking on this part, which is nothing like herself, and making it live. The main character, Carol, is not very bright, and has never stopped to examine her pampered but empty life. She speaks in the soft sexiness, cliches, half-formed thoughts, and demure submissiveness of a centerfold. In the hands of a poor actress, this could have been a cartoon, but Moore found the heart of the character and a way to make her sympathetic without being pathetic.

The highly stylized direction was done by Todd Haynes, who is most famous as the director of Velvet Goldmine.