Movie Review: ‘Passion’

Posted on the 19 August 2013 by House Of Geekery @houseofgeekery

Directed by: Brian De Palma

Starring: Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams

Plot: A powerful ad exec starts a war with her up and coming protege

Review:

Brian De Palma finds himself in familiar territory tackling the erotic thriller version of the Hatfields and McCoys. It stars Rachel McAdams as Chirstine, a powerful advertising executive, who starts a war with her up an coming protege, Noomi Rapace’s Isabelle. It starts out as simply as Christine taking credit for Isabelle’s work, which leads to Isabelle starting an affair with Christine’s boyfriend, and eventually becomes an ever escalating attempt to publicly humiliate each other. Unfortunately, Passion makes De Palma look more like an amateur than a former king of erotic thrillers.

One of De Palma’s strongest characteristics was the ability to create a frightening atmosphere that was never undermined by the sometimes eccentric characters that reside in his world. The complete opposite happens with Passion. Instead, his eccentric characters hijack the tone. Christine and Isabelle are soap opera characters. Rachel McAdams is over the top and chews up all of the scenery, while Rapace never looks comfortable in her own skin. Not in the way her character should, but like someone who is completely stuck in their head and way too conscious of the fact that she is on camera. It doesn’t help that every location, camera angle, and music choice seems to reinforce the idea that we are watching a soap opera instead of what could have been a great return to form for a filmmaker in desperate need of a win.

De Palma also seems to mistake a twisty dense plot for an intelligent one. Once this personal war escalates to a violent degree the movie moves with a much greater speed making it easier to glide over the smaller (yet still important details). These details plus ones we never got to see are revealed as it backtracks trying to give us an epiphany about the bigger plot at hand. It never comes off as particularly clever but rather annoying instead. The unreliable nature of the story digs itself a bigger and bigger hole with so many revisions that it starts getting kind of trippy, for no good reason, and leaves us with a pretty unsatisfying conclusion.

I was really hoping that this would be a return for De Palma after so many boring work-for-hire gigs, but this turned out to be a pretty misguided attempt at a throwback thriller. It is borderline comical how much it resembles a soap opera.

Rating: 2/10

What Else to Watch:  David Fincher’s The Game