Synopsis
Somewhere between life and death.
An adulterous woman's faith in God is tested when her husband dies and miraculously comes back to life.
1991 Directed by Nicolas Roeg
An adulterous woman's faith in God is tested when her husband dies and miraculously comes back to life.
Rideg mennyország, Kalter Himmel, Холодний рай, Студени небеса, Frío en el paraiso, Oscuri presagi, Холодные небеса, 冰冷天国
"Cold Heaven" is a 1991 thriller directed by Nicolas Roeg. Sifting through an assortment of lesser-known titles, this film attracted me directly based on Roeg's involvement. I know as an auteur; a signature quality would possibly be displayed in the piece. On the other hand, being a latter, less-known title in his filmography might sort things out that it is something of a lesser-known film for a reason. Unfortunately, a bit of the second scenario holds prominence with this film, but still a least one viewing serves some justice.
Roeg is always an applicator is surrealism and disjointed applications coming together. One of my favorite films of his, "Walkabout" (1971) serves to be a fever dream wandering in the desert…
Listen up, Nicolas Roeg admirers. This odd one -- featuring Theresa Russell, James Russo, Talia Shire, Will Patton, Mark Harmon -- of adultery guilt, and a boating accident in Acapulco, and a missing corpse, and religious disbelieving has an opening twenty minutes of inspired filmmaking. Roeg, as always, shoots it all with inventive angles to attain a jutting emotional reaction. As the film goes along it strives for bigger themes of paranoia and haunted lands and resurrection and leaps of faith (we're in Carmel, California where all these complications happen), but at a certain point I stopped caring to tie it all together in my own mind. There is stuff that occurs here that happens only-in-the-movies, but it's a convoluted,…
Could someone else please watch this? I need help.
Cold Heaven is either a confused, heavy-handed mess of melodrama and morality, or a masterpiece about faith, marriage, and grace. I want to believe it's the latter, but the film is so difficult to follow because it challenges your understanding of its aims at every turn.
As a part of Roeg's cinema, it's at once both incredibly different from his other films, and also a natural step forward from the films that preceded it. Where virtually all his films from Walkabout to Track 29 deal in some way with tumultuous marriage and relational discord, Cold Heaven might offer a solution. The plot of Cold Heaven is difficult to describe, but the…
I am very familiar with Roeg's work and nothing here is atypical in the context of his filmography, but, at the beginning, I was more bothered than interested, a very simple plot is presented but the movie seems to deny its development with each subsequent scene, the drama of marital problems soon gets overshadowed by indications of a more fantastic story driven by the protagonist's attempt to deal with guilt, so the tone is ill-defined (and over the top) from the start and the sudden intrusion of the supernatural obscures even more the movie's direction. It's too hermetic and impenetrable to captivate at first (those typical elements in Roeg I shouldn't estrange, especially considering his brilliant past collaborations with Theresa…
It's time to watch that Nic Roeg horror movie. No, not Don't Look Now, no, not The Witches, either, it's time for Cold Heaven. Oh, it's not a horror movie... Why'd I come into this thinking it was a horror movie...
From Rosenbaum:
"Most plots imply genres, and Roeg’s movies tend to elude generic straitjackets... Cold Heaven starts out as a standard melodrama about adultery, continues as a head-scratching mystery thriller, takes a slow left turn into religious allegory, and winds up as a speculative and highly moral poem about marriage. Trying to squeeze this plot into a genre would almost constitute an act of violence against movie and audience alike."
Go with Roeg's virtuoso style and let yourself be lifted away from plot or genre or narrative.
Lenny von Dohlen! It's always great to see a Twin Peaks alum pop up.
A film for those of us carry with us an unspecified feeling of guilt, who feel our actions have cataclysmic consequences, who don't necessarily believe in God but fear him on a cellular level.
Marketed as some kind of horror thriller, this surreal spiritual meditation from Nicolas Roeg defies classification at every turn as unfaithful wife Theresa Russell ends up dealing with the return of recently deceased husband Mark Harmon and a big brick wall in the form of her lapsed Catholic faith. Definitely not for everyone, but it certainly sticks with you.
mondo-digital.com/coldheaven.html
"I don't believe. I don't want to believe."
Another hole plugged. At this point I've seen every feature Nicolas Roeg made up to and including 1995's Two Deaths, and I'm thinking about leaving off here because the returns are definitely diminishing. (My library actually has Samson and Delilah on DVD, but I can't work up the enthusiasm for a three-hour Biblical miniseries, even one written by Allan Scott and featuring Michael Gambon, Dennis Hopper, and Diana Rigg.)
Speaking parenthetically of Allan Scott, he also penned the screenplay for this film, which stars Roeg's then-wife Theresa Russell as a woman planning to tell her pathologist husband (Mark Harmon, returning from Sweet Bird of Youth) that she's having an affair with one…
Brief Synopsis: An adulterous wife (Theresa Russell) is on the brink of confessing all to her husband (Mark Harmon) when he is killed in a speedboat accident. Or is he?
Verdict: Latter day Roegian weirdness. I'm not sure what this one was all about - maybe something to do with Catholic guilt?! - but as is often the case with Nicolas Roeg, the pleasures are to be had in the journey rather than the destination. The film isn't as cold as Eureka or as heavenly as The Man Who Fell To Earth, but it's another intriguing jigsaw puzzle of a movie from one of Britain's finest maverick talents. All the pieces weren't in the box this time, mind, but you can't have everything..
Trivia Note: The sixth of seven films Roeg made with his wife Russell.
Nicolas Roeg’s drama in which an extramarital woman’s (Theresa Russell) faith in God is tried when her husband (Mark Harmon) perishes and amazingly comes back to life.
While on holiday in Mexico, dejectedly married Marie Davenport (Theresa Russell) assembles the courage to inform her unaware husband, Alex (Mark Harmon), that she is departing him for her lover, Daniel Corvin (James Russo).
But before she gives him the awful news, Alex is embroiled in a boating incident – and Marie doesn’t know whether he’s perished or not. Faced with paranormal events, Marie turns back to Catholicism and pursues the assistance of Father Niles (Will Patton) and Sister Martha (Talia Shire), in this adaptation of the novel of the same name by…
I should’ve watched the trailer for this the whole way through. From the beginning of it, I expected things to progress more like a revenge-type thriller. What I got instead was something more perplexing and strange. Still, it was interesting, just not in the way I expected it to be.
I need to start a list here for “Films Non-Catholics Don’t Have A Chance in Hell of Understanding.”