Critics reviews

Many viewers might feel more comfortable tsk-tsking the desperate Stephen, especially as his actions grow increasingly catastrophic, pathetic, and embarrassing, but it is to Damage’s credit that it remains elegantly objective through the sordid screw-turnings of the plot.

A dull affair... The acting strays in different directions. Binoche is reduced to an elegant-chic clothes-horse; Irons, to point up the explosive, mysterious nature of erotic attraction, has to stress ordinariness, which strangely makes his motivation seem mysterious and the erotic attraction ordinary.

The fiercely erotic and deeply moving Damage casts a hypnotic spell and without moralizing... Malle’s psychological detective story doesn’t turn up all the answers, but his film is no less mesmerizing for rising to the challenge.

I'd prefer to think that the dullness of Damage isn't attributable to the remarkable Jeremy Irons, whom I consider an auteur — that is, a more powerful creative presence than any writer or director he works with. In this case he seems to have just honorably picked up his check because he couldn't find anything to be creative about (unless it's helping to arrive at the interesting positions he assumes with Juliette Binoche).

“Damage,” like “Last Tango in Paris” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” is one of those rare movies that is about sexuality, not sex; about the tension between people, not “relationships”; about how physical love is meaningless without a psychic engine behind it.

Melodramatic as this story tends to be, the principals manage to play it with unflinching belief, and their reality remains at the core of all of “Damage’s” artifice, drawing us in and making us believe.

A cold, brittle film about raging, traumatic emotions... [Damage] proves both compelling and borderline risible, wrenching and yet emotionally pinched.