Savage Grace Critic Reviews

Money, madness, incest and murder! Just the recipe for a twisted mesmerizer of a movie, if it doesn't creep you out.Read the full review

U.S. viewers may be put off by its tangled sexual motifs and find its implied social critique a little close to the bone. But even Stateside, Julianne Moore, in her most challenging role in years, will win plaudits and attract mature audiences to a thoroughly absorbing and polished piece of work.Read the full review

Savage Grace should have the force of Greek tragedy, but Kalin's chamber drama feels curiously stifling and flat, and Moore's volatile turn isn't enough to quicken its pulse.Read the full review

The director, Tom Kalin, stages acid duels, but he should have provided more psychological structure. Though Moore, a great actress, turns fury into verbal music, we're never quite sure what's driving her.Read the full review

A chilly inquest into very bad behavior, Savage Grace is presented to us like an entrée at a five-star French restaurant. It's decadence under glass.Read the full review

Living these lives, for these people, must have been sad and tedious, and so, inevitably, is their story, and it must be said, the film about it.Read the full review

It's tough to think of another film in which sex between a mother and her son is not necessarily the worst thing that happens.Read the full review

Savage Grace is a thoroughly disturbing story, told in a detached style rendering the overall experience an unsettling blend of lurid and vacuous.Read the full review

Scripter Howard A. Rodman's treatment of an enthralling book is more a series of vignettes rather than a fully connected work, and helmer Tom Kalin seems unable to decide how much Sirkian melodrama to introduce into the heady mix. Gone are the reasons to be fascinated with these people, merely replaced with maddeningly over-arch dialogue and struggles with characterization.Read the full review