Death And The Maiden

UK Release Date. 21 April 1995
Certification. 18
Running Time. 1 hour 43 mins
Director. Roman Polanski
Cast. Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, Stuart Wilson.
Rating. 67%

Review.

Death And The Maiden is the screen adaptation of the acclaimed play written by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman. The play opened at The Royal Court Theatre, London on 9 July 1991 with Lindsay Posner as director and starred Juliet Stevenson, Bill Paterson and Michael Byrne. The following year (17 March 1992), Mike Nichols directed a Broadway production, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York with an even more impressive cast featuring Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman.

The film's title comes from a piece of music written by the Austrian composer, Franz Schubert, String Quartet No. 14 in D minor - more commonly known as Death and the Maiden. The composition plays an integral part in Roman Polanski's film. 

Death And The Maiden is set in an unnamed South American country not long after the fall of a bloodthirsty regime (the similarities with a post-General Pinochet Chile are all too apparent). A former revolutionary and political prisoner, Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder believes she’s found the man, Dr Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley) who tortured, abused and raped her years ago. Her husband, Gerardo Escobar (Stuart Wilson), a successful lawyer who has recently been appointed to head up an investigation into human rights violations perpetrated by the former dictatorship is less certain.

Questionable casting decisions plague Death And The Maiden. The film would undoubtedly gain credibility if the director had cast Latin American or South American actors to fill the roles. Irrespective of this oversight, the cast's performance is uneven. Ben Kingsley is impressive as the nebulous hostage, a tantalising mix of innocence and malice. Stuart Wilson fails to make much of an impression and struggles to portray an authentic conscience to his wife's ever more extreme plans. Sigourney Weaver uncharacteristically overplays her role, which undermines an already sketchy script full of unwieldy dialogue. 

Death And The Maiden confronts a litany of moral conundrums surrounding guilt, revenge and justice, that hinges on the ambiguity of whether or not Paulina Escobar is right. Shuddering suspense combined with stinging moral gravity, Polanski successfully creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia to rival his 1965 offering, Repulsion.