Safe
d. Todd Haynes, 1995
Todd Hayne's 1995 melodrama Safe is a film I will revisit. With that said, everything in this review is based on a first viewing in which I probably did not understand everything that was going on.
Safe is about Carol (a brilliant Julianne Moore), a homemaker living in California that slowly begins to believe she may have some sort of disease dealing with her chemical reactions to the environment. Throughout the course of the film, as the disease (whatever it may be) affects Carol more, it also shifts what the audience is supposed to make of it. Ultimately, the are probably three main levesl to the movie. The first is that Safe is a brilliant character study carried by a magical performance by Moore. The second is that the film is a metaphor for AIDS as well as psychosomatic insanity. And the last, and most univesal and disturbing, is that the film is an exploration of the unknown.
Haynes shoots most of the scenes in Safe in either medium or long shots, which gives the impression that the environments Carol finds herself in dwarf her. He also uses the sound design of the film to create this sort of effect. Above all, the film is very intelligent and thematically courages and it is probably the quintessential (although by no means the standard) horror film of the 90s.
