New Restoration

“An existential horror movie … Like Akerman’s masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, Safe presents its affectless heroine in a series of precisely composed long takes, a portrait of female domesticity coming undone.”

Dennis Lim

Todd Haynes’s against-the-grain second feature—quite possibly his masterpiece—is one of the great movies of the 1990s. (The definitive one, according to a Village Voice poll.) Julianne Moore, outstanding in her first lead role, called the script ​“very, very spare, clear, and extremely emotional.” A work of startling formal control and unnerving detachment, Safe captures the zeitgeist (and malaise) of the end of the century with an eerie, austere precision. Moore plays affluent but afflicted housewife Carol, a woman hypersensitive, it seems, to the fumes, toxins, and chemical irritants we breathe in all the time. What Carol’s really allergic to, of course, may be something less easily defined. Haynes renders Carol’s predicament in stark, elegant compositions, making Kubrick-like use of long shots and decor to convey her alienation. He then whisks her off to New Mexico for rehab at a healing centre, which he sketches from a satirical disposition of great subtleness and restraint.

“Safe is so clearly a film that people are going to come back to, and it’s going to influence a new generation of filmmakers in ways we can’t even begin to imagine yet … When Todd has his retrospectives in ten, fifteen years, Safe is going to be the lost masterpiece in the bunch.”

Christine Vachon, Projections
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