The Comfort of Strangers (1990)

What makes The Comfort of Strangers so hypnotic is how it turns Venice—usually cinema’s postcard city—into a velvety maze where beauty and dread share the same narrow alley. Paul Schrader directs with cool, rigorous control, letting the camera linger on candlelit interiors and damp stone corridors until you feel the city watching the characters back, and the menace arrives less as a shock than as a slow, seductive pressure. Christopher Walken is mesmerizingly courteous and unreadable, and opposite him Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson bring a believable intimacy that makes every pleasant conversation feel faintly off-key. It’s not a casual Friday-night thriller—its erotic charge and bleak intensity can be tough going—but if you’re in the mood for an elegant, unsettling film that gets under your skin and stays there, this one delivers.

The Comfort of Strangers is trying to be a sultry, fever-dream thriller about desire, power, and the way a beautiful place like Venice can turn into a maze you can’t escape. Paul Schrader leans hard into mood over momentum, so if you need clear motivations, natural dialogue, or characters you can emotionally grab onto, this can feel chilly, opaque, and frankly a bit self-conscious. It also builds to some genuinely disturbing sexualized violence, so anyone sensitive to that kind of material should steer well clear. If you’re in the mood for an art-house nightmare with Christopher Walken doing unsettling charm and a thick atmosphere that lingers, you may appreciate it; if you want a coherent, satisfying thriller, it’s likely to waste your time.