The Comfort of Strangers (1990) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

A young British couple returns to Venice, where they had once shared a fiery romance. They have lost some of that flame, and hope to rekindle it. While there, they get lost one night and are rescued by a mysterious Italian who resides in a nearby palazzo. As the film progresses, the normal young couple start to realize that the older man and his wife are very strange, and will eventually require something very intimate and perverse from the young Brits. At first, the younger couple sees hints of mild eccentricity in the elder duo, but the hints become flagrant, and the mild eccentricities turn out to be deep psychoses. The primary dramatic tension in the film hinges on whether the young couple will recognize their apparent, if unstated, peril in time to escape from it. The secondary source of dramatic movement is the audience's curiosity about exactly what that peril might be.

This movie has "menacing" down to a science. Here's the formula:

• hire Harold Pinter to write the screenplay

• get Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren to deliver the lines

• set it in Venice late at night, where every corridor seems to lead into a desolate, foggy, dead-end, and every road is a waterfront.

• shoot every camera angle with a weird twist.

• add the extra touches. Have a tracking shot sneak through an alley and come upon the young lovers. Have doors and windows being opened by unseen hands. Show plenty of close-ups of potential weapons for murder or torture.

You get the picture.

Comfort was directed by Paul Shrader, who co-wrote Martin Scorsese's best films. Shrader's direction is not as accomplished as his writing, but he's had some interesting if not altogether successful directing credits, like Light Sleeper, Cat People, and last year's Bob Crane biopic, Auto Focus. As you can see from that list, he likes dark, sexual themes and is not afraid of nudity.

It is a wordy four character play paced very slowly over two hours. I like the movie, although it is certainly not a mass market offering. It's a truly creepy, odd, ultimately mean-spirited film which makes brilliant use of Walken as the vehicle for Pinter's omnipresent sense of dripping menace lurking beneath a patina of polite words. Walken, who is menacing while being amiable and polite, even while being gracious, was born to act with Pinter's dialogue. There could be no better setting for these sinister goings-on than Venetian alleys and interiors.  This is probably the most fully realized example of Harold Pinter's genius on film.