Death and the Maiden

Death and the Maiden
by Roman Polanski

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DVD details

Actor: Ben Kingsley, Jonathan Vega, Krystia Mova, Sigourney Weaver, Stuart Wilson
Director: Roman Polanski
Brand: Warner Brothers
Producer: Ariel Dorfman
Writer: Ariel Dorfman
Producer: Bonnie Timmermann
Producer: Gladys Nederlander
Producer: Jane Barclay
Producer: Josh Kramer
Writer: Rafael Yglesias
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 103 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-06-03
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: New Line Home Video

DVD Reviews of Death and the Maiden

DVD Review: Not Polanski's best film.
Summary: 2 Stars

I didn't like this film, I thought that Sigourney Weaver's character was annoying. I also found the film to be slow moving and somewhat dull. All in all, I don't recommend this film, and put it in the same class as one of his other films, Cul-De-Sac, which also was dull and boring. All his other films I enjoy though.

DVD Review: One of Sigourney's top performances!
Summary: 5 Stars

Sigourney Weaver, next to Meryl Streep is one of the best American actresses going today. I'm not sure why Oscar gold has eluded her for so long. Death and the Maiden, Gorillas in the Mist and A Map of the World to me are Sigourney's best performances to date. I have yet to see the made for TV movie, Prayers for Bobby. And if you are like me and enjoy the occasional action, suspense or horror film, you will remember her fine performances in the Alien franchise, Copycat with Holly Hunter or the Grimm Brother's Snow White: A Tale of Terror. Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, Frantic) directs these wonderful actors in a very intense, thrilling drama that engrosses the viewer until the final frame. On a stormy evening, Paulina's (Weaver) husband Gerardo befriends a stranger who helps him with his car trouble. When he invites the stranger inside, Paulina recognizes the voice from the other room as Dr. Miranda, a man who may have brutally tortured and raped her years before. She runs from the house, steals his car and pushes it off a cliff but not before discovering a tape of classical music in the car that was playing at the time she was brutalized. Feeling her suspicians are confirmed, she returns to the house as her husband and Dr. Miranda are asleep. Bound and gagged, Paulina taunts the doctor and presses him to admit the truth about what happened and reveals her plan to eventually kill him. He denies the accusations and husband Gerardo doesn't know what to believe. All is revealed in the end about whether the doctor is innocent or guilty. With only 3 actors and one main setting, the film is an intriguing character study that quickly sucks the viewer into the story and makes them question what may be true and what isn't until the climatic ending. This doesn't seem to be as widely known as some of Polanski or Weaver's other films and that's a shame. This is really some of the best work put together. Hopefully more people will discover this sad, yet meaningful film.

DVD Review: Very interesting movie
Summary: 4 Stars

I am a fan of Sigourney Weaver and wanted this for my collection, it was more than I expected, quite an interesting and historical movie, very powerful.

DVD Review: Death and the Maiden
Summary: 5 Stars

Along with Gorillas in the Mist, this has to be one of the best movies S. Weaver has ever made. It is one of those Deja Vous movies where you wonder if what happened to her in Argentina could yet happen to you in this country (under the Patriot Act??). Don't blame 'er a bit for being furious.

DVD Review: Good drama
Summary: 3 Stars

Death and the Maiden is overall a very good drama. Roman Polanski creates another "Repulsion", this time with two additional characters. Based on a play and doesn't attempt to hide it's stage origins, the film flows remarkably well and doesn't get long winded.

It relies heavily on good performances and Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley are more than up to the task. Weaver is particularly effective as the film plays on viewer's emotions and for a good period of time, one doesn't know at all who's to blame and who deserves pity.

There's not much in the way of directorial touches that scream out POLANSKI, but as in "Repulsion", he milks the isolated setting for all it's worth.

Description of Death and the Maiden

A marriage becomes strained when the wife is confronted with a man she is convinced tortured and brutalized her when she was in jail years earlier.

Roman Polanski's film adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's stunning play about the legacy of torture has more in common with the director's first film, Knife in the Water (with all the latter's unnerving ambiguities about power, sexual transgression, and confused alliances among three people) than a straightforward political parable. Sigourney Weaver (a bit underwhelming in this role, but good overall) plays a former political prisoner in an unnamed South American country that has gone democratic. She is married to a government official (fine work by Stuart Wilson) heading up official inquiries into the practice of torture under the former regime. Still shattered by her experience, Weaver's character seeks safe haven in closets of the cliff-top house she shares with her husband. But when the latter comes home in the company of a seemingly nice fellow (a brilliant Ben Kingsley), she believes she recognizes the stranger as the interrogator who raped her repeatedly in prison. She violently takes him hostage, and what ensues is a hurricane of fury and confusion, as Kingsley's terrified character denies all accusations, Wilson's guilt-ridden spouse can't decide whom to defend, and Weaver turns her psychosexual rage into a weapon of humiliation. Dorfman adapted the screenplay himself, but there's no question that Polanski is leading us down a familiar path of human betrayal and terror that he crossed in such films as Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, and Bitter Moon. At times stunning in its bluntness and compelling to the last, Death and the Maiden literally takes us to the edge of oblivion, where--in Polanski's films--the hardest truths always seem to fall into a heretofore unknown perspective. --Tom Keogh

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Death and the Maiden: Tie-In Edition (Plays, Penguin)
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