film

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) is one of the most powerful and unsettling portraits of domestic life produced in the history of American independent cinema. Gena Rowlands delivers a powerhouse performance as Mabel Longhetti, a wife and mother whose increasingly erratic behaviour exposes the suffocating expectations placed on women within the family. Peter Falk plays her husband Nick, a construction worker who loves Mabel but struggles to understand her, caught between tenderness, frustration and a desperate need to keep up appearances. 

John Cassavetes’ semi-improvised dialogue, restless camerawork and uncomfortably intimate framing place the viewer right in the middle of a family unravelling in real time. A remarkable exploration of the razor-thin boundary between eccentricity and illness, love and control and normality and madness.