Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
Directed by Joseph Ruben
A young woman fakes her own death in an attempt to escape her nightmarish marriage, but discovers it is impossible to elude her controlling husband.
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What critics compared Sleeping with the Enemy to
Touches of Sleeping With the Enemy (1991) and Hollow Man (2000) aside, Whannell’s rebirth of The Invisible Man feels like a fresh take blending the most minimal of threads from H.G. Wells‘ novel with more urgent themes from today.
In the movie’s breathtaking opening (one seemingly modeled after “Sleeping With the Enemy”), she carefully, with disgust on her face, lifts the hand draped over her in bed.
One is a thriller about escaping an abusive relationship, in the vein of Sleeping with the Enemy or Enough .
The result is a film that is less like Hollow Man (though there are some similar and less convincing visual effects at play) and more akin to Sleeping With the Enemy with the paranoia and trauma cranked to 100 as it focuses on the long-lived affects of gaslighting and abuse.
The narrative is a mix of Sleeping with the Enemy , The Entity and Hollow Man .
The terrors of escaping from an abusive relationship have been depicted in films before—there are similarities here to 1991’s Sleeping with the Enemy—but the unknowns that underpin so much of this film make its themes come alive.
But those going into Safe Haven expecting The Notebook redux will come out of it terribly disappointed as it quickly degenerates into a Sleeping With The Enemy rip-off and is undone by a convoluted story, contrived characters and a lot of shameless manipulation on the part of the filmmakers.
The set-up's ridiculous (and done much better in Sleeping with the Enemy starring Julia Roberts ) and the characters are of the one-dimensional variety taken to an extreme level.
Though never far from resembling 1991's "Sleeping with the Enemy" and the Stephen King tome "Rose Madder," "Safe Haven" isn't satisfied to exist solely as a well-lit, idyllically-set love story, but further involves by adding mystery, thriller, and other surprising genre elements into the mix.
If you’ve seen the Julia Roberts thriller “Sleeping With the Enemy,” you can add another checkmark to the list of familiar ingredients in this potboiler.
The 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy featured Julia Roberts as Laura Burney, a nice young woman trying to restart her life after escaping an abusive and controlling husband.
The movie, opening in theaters Thursday, plays like a sanitized remake of "Sleeping with the Enemy," right down to an over-the-top climax set during a fireworks display.
The Golden Age of Stylish Movies About Stalkers commenced with “Fatal Attraction” in 1987 and ran through the mid-1990s, with films such as “Pacific Heights,” “Single White Female,” “Sleeping With the Enemy,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” “Bad Influence,” “Disclosure,” “Fear,” “Unlawful Entry” and wow there were a LOT of movies back then with posters featuring good-looking humans and their good-looking tormenters.
"Sleeping With the Enemy" is merely "Fatal Attraction" with a splash of Brut -- a relentlessly formulaic look at the downside of sexual obsession, directed by Joseph Ruben.
We need to see him as a kind of male equivalent of the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction: a quasi-sympathetic monster whose dementia is really a twisted form of emotional pain.
This is in the 'never trust appearances' mould popularised by Fatal Attraction and Pacific Heights.
And in the wake of movies like "Jagged Edge," "Fatal Attraction" and director Joseph Ruben's own (and much better) "The Stepfather," you also know that the only thing that can stop these relentless SOBs is a bullet.
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Of course, Lyne could have been trolling us all along and this is all Vic’s version of events, which would have made for a much more intriguing flick (a kind of Sleeping With the Enemy from the mad, bad bloke’s cracked psychological perspective), but sadly this is all a straight take, complete with Tracy Letts’ increasingly suspicious screenwriter, Affleck conducting an extended chase scene on a mountain bike and literal aqua-based potential crimes.
In fact, his wealth disguises the most disturbing element of the story: if Christian isn’t rich, this movie is “Sleeping with the Enemy,” with whips.
Acclaimed for cult favorites such as "The Stepfather," Ruben makes a calculated bid for commercial acceptance with this psychosexual hair-raiser, a tale of a battered wife that flirts with, but never truly attains a female perspective.
And in the wake of movies like "Jagged Edge," "Fatal Attraction" and director Joseph Ruben's own (and much better) "The Stepfather," you also know that the only thing that can stop these relentless SOBs is a bullet.
Ruben's 1987 film " The Stepfather " received high praise in some quarters for its portrait of a soft-spoken, clear-eyed man who specialized in marrying women with children and then killing them and looting their assets.
Joseph Ruben (Sleeping with the Enemy, The Forgotten ) directs competently though perhaps not as playfully as the material could have used, but O'Quinn gets in a few prime moments, such as the startling one in which he forgets which persona he's currently occupying.