Popular reviews

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★

  The first half's largely silent, simultaneously lurid and sensitive depiction of assault and trauma and shame could have been the whole movie, a 70-minute bullet. Once it turns into a sweaty two-hander it starts to lean way too heavily on clunky metaphor and Actor's Studio histrionics, and that ending doesn't even come close to the thorny catharsis it wants.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½ 1

  49/100

  Quite the rollercoaster ride, this. At first I thought Garfein had made Elle over half a century ago—which would be astonishing, given how morally ambiguous Verhoeven's film comes across even today. Then it became clear that Mary Ann is suffering from PTSD, though that term hadn't yet been coined in 1961. (Not sure if "shell-shocked" was used in non-military contexts back then.) Very impressed by most of the first hour, especially the initial dialogue-free stretch; it's uniquely disturbing to watch a woman who's just been raped methodically cut up the clothes she was wearing and flush them down the toilet. The second half, though...yeesh. I recognize that the ending isn't meant to be perceived as happy, but it doesn't…

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  Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★½

  TW: Discussion of Rape

  "In one of his many bold choices as a director, Garfein follows Mary Ann’s rape with a near-wordless sequence that simply shows her actions following her ordeal. It is an extraordinary act of empathy on his part, furthering our connection to the character as she attempts to move forward with her life. After her rape, Mary Ann isn’t even remotely the same person she was a few minutes earlier: Her breathing is fractured, she’s caked in dust and dirt, and she carries a look of desolation upon her face. She tries to pull herself together, buttoning up her cardigan, but even that basic task seems insurmountable as she misses buttons and stops after only closing a…

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  Review by 🔮 dana danger 🔮 ★★★

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  i can't help but feel like this slipped between my fingers - rarely have i been so ultimately disappointed in a film that i started off loving. the first 45 minutes are a remarkable portrait of mary anne, a traumatized woman, trying to figure out how to live in her own skin - and creating a new, withdrawn life - after being sexually assaulted. eventually, however, the movie introduces mike, a violent alcoholic who saves from throwing herself from a bridge by ripping her away from the edge and throwing her onto the ground. from this inauspicious beginning, he takes mary anne to his house so she can "rest"; instead, he locks her in, makes her his captive, and forces…

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  Review by Jenna Ipcar ★★ 8

  Listen to me curse about this movie little more than I should have in the latest episode of Cinema60 where we play FMK with the year 1961.

  This feels like a male interpretation of how women deal with trauma in the worst possible way. It starts out as this super introspective and interesting character study of a young woman dealing with the trauma of having been raped (think Repulsion but like 4 years earlier), and then halfway through it takes this 180 degree turn into pulp-y kidnapping / power fantasy of keeping women in your basement as slaves. It straight up infuriates me, because if it had just been either of those two it would have been a solid movie,…

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  Review by D Rock ★★½

  What's a little forcible confinement between friends, right?

  The highlight of this 1961 film might be Saul Bass' opening title sequence, exceptional as usual. There's also some terrific footage of New York throughout. More importantly, the first half of Something Wild takes a brave, daring approach to a very difficult subject.

  But from a modern perspective, the messaging of the story's second half is really difficult to digest.

  Something Wild endeavours to show the aftermath of the rape of a young woman. Afraid to tell anyone, Carroll Baker's young student bottles up her trauma and so begins a downward PTSD spiral that takes her to a very, very dark place. The first half follows her there and you're thinking you're…

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  Review by Jay D 's Watching ★★★ 2

  How my brain tricks itself:

  1st - seeing a list of movie titles posted that are going to be leaving the Criterion Channel on Twitter at the end of the month. Hey, it includes Something Wild!
  2nd - Me, assuming 'Something Wild' is the Demme comedy from the 80s-I'm in the mood for a feel-good comedy and I liked the last Demme i saw a few weeks ago, I'll give it a go this week!
  3rd- logging into Criterion Channel and pulling up Something Wild--wait, that's a different movie. Hmm. It doesn't look like a carefree comedy, neither. Well, maybe it'll still be solid.
  4th- (while watching) Good cinematography, but the subject matter here is pretty grim. Hope it at least has a hopeful ending.
  5th - (as THE END appears on screen, clutching my chest) Arrrrrrrrgh, my soul..........

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★ 1

  Discussed with Kim Morgan in the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs. Radical in so many ways—opening with 20 minutes of silence, a shift from NYC-served kitchen sink realism to a psycho-sexual chamber drama, and Garfien's masterful direction: pushy but not showy, played for silences, and an abstraction of space while letting the camera hang back. Funny to see him as part of the same school as Elia Kazan, because a lot of what works in the direction here is his restraint, while you can imagine Elia letting loose (not necessarily a bad thing, but he couldn't have pulled this movie off).

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  Review by Meg 2

  This film has lived in the shadows of my brain since I saw it years age 17. I watched it on YouTube one day knowing nothing about it.

  I couldn't explain what I saw and how I felt about it. I desperately wanted to discuss it with someone. But, I couldn't find anything written on it (and the YouTube comment section was not ideal). No one I knew in the film blog world had written about it either.

  I felt so much, and could articulate none of it. I ended up writing a couple of sentences on my blog sandwiched in an otherwise light-hearted film round-up:

  Next was Something Wild, but I took no screenshots. It was not a screenshot…

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★

  Something Wild opens with an incredible Saul Bass title sequence that quickly pans up and down buildings, across lit windows at night, and swoops over crowds. It works well to set certain expectations about the location. It may be a chaotic and dangerous place and the people there may be too busy to know one another. There is a kind of implicit warning to it. In a place where so many people are doing so many unknowable things there are bound to be at least a few monsters lurking. When things are happening at such a quick pace how can anyone hope to catch those who wrong them and hold them accountable?

  The film is simmering with the social anxieties…

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  Review by XM ★★★

  Qui aurait cru qu’aller dans le sous-sol creepy où vit le dude que tu viens de rencontrer allait bien finir? L’amour issu du syndrome de Stockholm est quand même vrai, right?

  C’est dommage que la fin soit dégueulasse et que la 2e partie soit franchement plate et beaucoup trop surjouée, parce que la 1ere partie torche. J’sais pas pourquoi, mais ça me parle quelqu’un qui erre dans la ville avec le poids de ses démons sur les épaules... tsé, c’est pas comme si je faisais ça presque quotidiennement... En plus, c’est crissement bien filmé et on ne se le cachera pas, mais New York > Villeray.

  J’aurais peut-être dû écouter le remake de Demme à la place... (je suis si drôle...)

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  Review by Jason Bailey ★★★★½

  This drama from co-writer/director Jack Garfein is a bit of a case of buried treasure – released to little fanfare in 1961, it was quickly forgotten but subsequently rediscovered a decade or so ago. It’s easy to see why it didn’t land then, but works now; it’s a vivid (often shockingly so) portrait of a young woman’s post-rape trauma, as she tries to wipe the slate with a new home and new job, only to find that she can’t escape herself. The great Carroll Baker ('Baby Doll') is uncomfortably convincing in the leading role – it hard not to feel the visceral discomfort of her daily interactions – while Garfein’s direction has the logic and cognitive qualities of a particularly discombobulating nightmare. It’s a movie that moves deliberately and often speaks in a whisper, but it still shakes you up, and good.