Safe

A housewife in suburban Los Angeles, Carol White, has her house redecorated. Then come the coughing fits, the panic attacks, the nosebleeds. Doctors find nothing. Carol starts to believe the problem is the chemicals around her and leaves home for Wrenwood, a new-age desert community for people with environmental illness. Surrounded there by people like her, her isolation only deepens. Todd Haynes directed. Julianne Moore plays Carol in her first leading role. It premiered at Sundance in January 1995. Haynes researched real environmental illness organisations for the script and drew on films including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jeanne Dielman in shaping how it is told. The one million dollar budget took a long time to raise. The cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy suggested keeping the camera deliberately distant, so the viewer can never get close to Carol. The box office stopped at 512,245 dollars, but the film grew with critics. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 88 percent. It took four Independent Spirit nominations and came first in The Village Voice's poll for the best film of the 1990s. Haynes has confirmed the illness is multiple chemical sensitivity. The film also looks at the AIDS crisis of the eighties and at a self-help culture that puts the whole responsibility for recovery on the patient. Who it is for: viewers who like slow, cold, unsettling films. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for a diagnosis. The film never tells you what happened to Carol and never claims she got better.