Stepen King is the fashion writer most adapted to current cinema, made in the United States. He is considered a Master of Terror. We have seen a good number of his stories, but this is the one that offers a quasi-study of how the mind of the leading character is getting sick, and that is already a cinematographic delicacy. He places the story in 1922, with all his lifestyle, to develop obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia and a tendency to suicide as an escape route. The narrative is built on a first-person account by Wilfred James, the story’s unreliable narrator. He writes a long confession to the murder of his wife, Arlette, at Hemingford Home, Nebraska, in 1922. Choosing that historical time makes the film a complex production given the simplicity of the plot: A woman inherits a farm and decides to sell it to go to school. city, to which her husband opposes, but she advances with her project and warns him that she will take their son; and only that begins to corrode the soul of the husband who has a smaller neighboring farm and knows that he can lose his son that for him (as it was mostly in those days in the USA) has a nominal value (indicates the theoretical value or ideal of anything that can be quantifiable, as opposed to actual value), which drives him crazy. It is with these elements that a direct and enveloping narrative is built that takes advantage of each scene to show the degradation of that family and the mental disorder that generates a feeling of guilt in the protagonist. The crudeness and at the same time the elegance of the staging are torpedoed by some elements such as the insistent display of scenes with mice that, obviously, seek to point out the rottenness that the central character is becoming and his madness. As a psychological drama, the thriller goes deep with an excellent direction. Despite the predictability of how it will end -because it already warns from the beginning-, the direction in the eloquent editing maintains the interest scene after scene, due to the way in which it carries out the process of developing the guilt of several characters before the same made of blood that tends to upset the individual when he tries to justify what he knows he has done wrong. The performance is brilliant and offers an optimal characterization of the mental disorder. It is an excellent immersive experience. On Netflix.
HHHHH Genre: psychological drama. Duration: 100 minutes
