Opiniões dos críticos

Misery is memorable enough as a brisk two-hander willing to get loony, though I can’t imagine there’d be much to fuss over without its prime ingredient: Kathy Bates. Her mercurial performance as the infamous nurse Annie is the film’s backbone, elevating what might’ve been a single-note psycho-thriller into a layered portrait of madness and authorial anxiety.

You’d have to be churlish not to be entertained... [Misery] hasn’t any depth to speak of, but is consistently shrewd enough not to go totally obvious ways. And the audacity in casting Kathy Bates as the dotty fan pays considerable dividends.

William Goldman's intelligent script operates both as psycho-thriller and as sly comment on the sort of attitude towards celebrity which can enshrine and - in this case, literally - imprison the object of devotion... Reiner captures just the right level of physical tension, but for the most part wisely emphasises the mental duels. Terrific.

It's a situation with lots of standard tension tactics borrowed from the eminently superior "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane". As such [Misery] resembles a slick reworking of that film but without the classier script or direction. Where it is significantly elevated is in the terrifyingly convincing performance by Bates as a schizophrenic psychopath.

There are a few holes in the plot, mainly towards the end, but from start to harrowing finish, it is blissfully apparent that Rob Reiner can indeed turn his hand to virtually anything.

A skillfully pared-down (if psychologically thin) horror thriller... crisply directed by Rob Reiner... The economy of both script and direction is admirable—there’s no wasted motion in sight—though the film’s anthology of genre cliches ultimately undermines Bates’s heroic efforts to make it something more.

[Misery] is a good story, a natural, and it grabs us. But just as there is almost no way to screw it up, so there’s hardly any way to bring it above a certain level of inspiration... The result is good craftsmanship, and a movie that works. It does not illuminate, challenge or inspire, but it works.

As compelling as “Misery” often is, I can’t say that I really enjoyed it a whole lot. It’s too flat-footed and vise-like. Reiner doesn’t provide the kind of nasty, sophisticated finesse that might have lifted the film out of pulpdom and into more Hitchcockian terrain. Like Paul, Reiner may want to persuade the world that he’s not ready to be pigeon-holed.

Annie is a great horror-film character, but "Misery" means to be more than a horror film. It seems to want to be a Hitchcockian kind of cat-and-mouse suspense melodrama, which demands a lot more ingenuity than Mr. Reiner or Mr. Goldman ever muster.

Misery is a very obvious and very commercial gothic thriller, a functional adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller... the fun comes from the ebb and flow nastiness of the two characters in a love/hate (often hate/hate) relationship.