The Comfort of Strangers

Mr. Schrader is a director of great rigor and discipline. The movie is fascinated by the baroque behavior it observes, but without imitating it.

Schrader, one of this country's most literate filmmakers, can be a show-off, and there are times in The Comfort of Strangers when we're more aware of style than story -- this piece is impeccably tailored, and it looks awfully good even when it isn't making sense. [17 May 1991, p.G11]

Director Paul Schrader has fashioned a film of surpassing creepiness. It's pretentious, too, and sometimes maddeningly dull. But the erotically unsettling atmosphere – exquisitely rendered by cinematographer Dante Spinotti – soon seeps in.

Something about The Comfort of Strangers remains aloof, creating a physical and emotional distance between its characters and its audience. Some of that is, no doubt, Pinter's script. But Schrader pinpoints a nucleus of moral decay and then observes it with a detached clinician's eye rather than the eye if a rapt storyteller.

Slow and foreboding with a memorably creepy Christopher Walken. If you're looking for fun, this ain't it.

The Comfort of Strangers is luridly silly, yet it isn’t quite dull. Walken takes his usual glassy-eyed menace to new levels of high-camp refinement — he manages to be over the top and minimal at the same time — and the film has an extravagantly lush atmosphere, due in large part to the music of Twin Peaks‘ Angelo Badalamenti.

When the film at last reaches its supposedly shocking conclusion, it resembles an overinflated balloon that has finally burst. It is a film that demands that you pay close attention, then rewards none of your diligence. [12 Apr 1991, p.4]