Synopsis
Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s, comes down with a debilitating illness with no clear diagnosis.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Julianne MooreCarol
- Xander BerkeleyGreg
- Dean NorrisMover
- Julie BurgessAerobics Instructor
- Ronnie FarerBarbara
- Jodie MarkellAnita
- Susan NormanLinda
- Martha VelezFulvia
- Chauncey LeopardiRory
- SaachikoDry Cleaners Manager
Recommendations
- 100
Los Angeles Times
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. - 100
Slant Magazine
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. - 100
Washington Post
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. - 100
The Dissolve
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. - 89
Austin Chronicle
What Safe does so brilliantly is to plunge us down this frightening rabbit hole with Carol. - 75
Chicago Sun-Times
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. - 75
Chicago Tribune
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. - 63
ReelViews
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.
