Safe

Insidious and provocative, Safe refuses to lend a hand, avoids taking sides or pointing the way. Everything that happens in this beautifully controlled enigma is open to multiple interpretations, and that extends finally to the title's meaning as well. Read full review

We know nothing of this woman’s inner-traumas, the repressed memories or hidden pains of her youth, yet Moore, in an extraordinary milestone performance, gives us a glimpse inside Carol’s frail and lonely soul. Read full review

This spooky film's ostensible subject—an environmental illness known as multiple chemical sensitivity—is merely a starting place for this mesmerizing horror movie, feminist tract and medical mystery.

As a piece of filmmaking, Safe is brilliant for the way Haynes, in concert with cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy and composer Ed Tomney, blankets the mundane in the eerie tone of science fiction and horror, especially in the first half. Read full review

Todd Haynes' Safe grips you with its air of antiseptic malevolence and leaves you gasping. You feel as disoriented as the protagonist, a young housewife suffering from 20th-century disease. [11 Aug 1995]

What Safe does so brilliantly is to plunge us down this frightening rabbit hole with Carol. Read full review

Safe gets messy, but you won’t be able to wash it out of your system anytime soon. Read full review

Maybe the environment is poisoned, and the group is phony, and Carol is gnawing away at her own psychic health. Now there's a fine mess. Read full review

Though Haynes' methods are austere and his style dry, the terror of his narrative becomes more palpable as the film unwinds. The picture's eerie delicacy, meticulous technique and rapt formality may distance us, but they also steadily strip bare the panic at its core. Read full review

For all its flaws and vagueness, Safe is smart, challenging and provocative -- a film that gives you plenty to chew on, long after Carol's sad tale has wound down. Read full review

Safe, disturbing and edgy and grounded by Moore's riveting performance, resonates with uncertainty. Read full review

Safe does not succeed at everything it attempts. The film is overlong and there are times when more aggressive editing might have improved the pace. However, despite certain dramatic shortcomings, Safe is an insightful and darkly comical social commentary. Read full review

Like Carol, Safe is a little too internalized for its own good: When it's over, you wish you would run into Haynes in the theater lobby so you could ask him more than a few questions. [22 Sep 1995, p.6G]

With Todd Haynes' direction suggesting a Twilight Zone full court press, this uncommonly rigid movie is either bloodlessly objective or so subtly droll that the joke is beyond comprehension. But given that Haynes previously utilized a cast of Barbie dolls in the brazenly daring Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, it's tempting to give him the benefit of the doubt. [21 June 1995, p.7D]

Brilliantly as it begins, Safe eventually succumbs to its own modern malady, as the film maker insists on a chilly ambiguity that breeds more detachment than interest. Read full review

Frequently fascinating, it never builds into anything profound. Read full review

The audaciousness that marked Todd Haynes’ earlier work has been supplanted by self-important preachiness in Safe. Read full review