Safe
By Kit Macdonald
The great (and we don't use that word lightly) Todd Haynes, who would go on to direct Velvet Goldmine, I'm Not There and Carol, had already made waves with the controversial and later outright banned Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) and his feature debut, Poison (1991), by the time Safe appeared in 1995, the year he turned 30. Where Poison was a provocative exploration of Aids-era perceptions and subversions, Safe found him taking a more subtle and restrained approach, exploring themes of anxiety, alienation and the porous boundary between the psychological and the environmental.
Filmed for $1m but with the look and feel of a movie costing at least 10 times that, Safe features a brilliantly restrained Julianne Moore playing Carol White, a homemaker with an immaculate yet hollow life. She begins experiencing mysterious physical reactions, but doctors can find nothing wrong with her, leaving a void of uncertainty that Haynes uses to probe the era’s rising fears around toxins, pollution and bodily vulnerability, as well as the emotional suffocation of the domestic world. Safe was named the best film of the 1990s by The Village Voice Film Poll – see it if you possibly can.