Critics reviews

Safe was sly and suggestive, but its power resided in the lived-in physicality of Moore’s performance as the indelibly named Carol White. As in Superstar, Haynes used Safe’s nightmarish scenario to chip away at his star’s pristine, porcelain beauty, and Moore’s exposed-nerve acting credibly showed the horror of what lay beneath.

It remains perhaps [Haynes'] greatest film in an oeuvre full of great films... Plot point by plot point, and even more so, banal, gendered occasion by banal, gendered occasion (from interior decorating to aerobics to a mother's house gathering), the allegory expands and contradicts itself in surprising and illuminating ways.

Fascinatingly allegorical in almost every sense, Safe is ultimately a modernization of the women's film of the 40s and 50s via the lens of the hollowness of conspicuous consumption. Haynes's rigorous compositions situate Carol within an oppressively organized frame, when in fact all she probably needs is a little chaos.

The movie's greatest irony may be its title. Depriving the viewer of a comfortable vantage point, "Safe" isn't.

What's consistently challenging about Safe is its refusal to ever quite lay down its hand, such that Haynes continues to weave in and out of bluffs and conviction in equal measure, possessing a poker face of the highest order.

Haynes has acknowledged the influence of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and like Akerman's masterpiece, Safe presents its affectless heroine in a series of precisely composed long takes.Safe is less rigorous in its use of duration, but some of its framing choices are even more extreme: the director of photography, Alex Nepomniaschy, emphasizes Carol's alienation by stranding her in cavernous interiors and on the margins of wide shots.

Safe was only Haynes' second feature, following 1991's Poison, but the formal control he demonstrates is awe inspiring. Visually, he shoots it like a horror film, often placing Carol at the center of the frame in compositions that see her dwarfed by her surroundings, then slowly tracking in toward her blank face... The movie wouldn't work, though, without Moore's stupendous performance as Carol.

...From this description, it may be tempting to read Carol's journey of spiritual awakening as one of empowerment... And certainly, this analysis initially seems supported by the narrative. Such a reading, however, would ignore the class privilege at work in Haynes' ultimately critical film. Specifically, the dangerous ways upper-middle-class self-involvement and delusion can be mistaken for radical self-actualization and empowerment.

The black couches are in many ways the opposite of the lilac scarf Cathy Whitaker, another housewife played by Moore, wears in Haynes's Far from Heaven (2002). There, the scarf is the only part of Cathy that can break free of the rigid life she's built around herself, and it provides a symbol, an image of escape; the black couches of Safe, meanwhile, enact the force of revolt that causes Carol's world to collapse upon her, to become utterly unfamiliar and hostile.

The devastating power of the close-up becomes the very tool to witness how the face of a healthy woman has transformed into a veritable corpse, lost beyond any future possibility of a productive societal exchange. After being repeatedly denied, we seem to be granted access to Carol's inner self.

Safe is a masterpiece – if for no other reason than the discomforting feelings of claustrophobia in open space that its imagery so expertly generates. Its visuals have the sterility of Kubrick. They transform familiar suburban and natural landscapes into boxed-in prisons.

Todd Haynes's enviro-disease masterpiece Safe might just be the most terrifying film of the last decade. There are no monsters or homicidal maniacs here—instead, the film's horror emanates from an abstruse place where suburban drudgery gives way to a self-inflicted, existential crisis.