That Cold Day in the Park

A cold, wet day in Vancouver. Frances, wealthy and living alone, sees a young man shivering on a bench in the park outside her window. She invites him in. He does not speak, and she takes that as a gift. First a meal, then a bed, then the door locked from the outside. Who is holding whom becomes unclear and the film gets somewhere frightening without wasting time. Robert Altman directed. Sandy Dennis plays Frances and Michael Burns the young man. Laszlo Kovacs shot it. This was Altman's first genuinely personal film, made independently and plainly related to the style he would build in the years after. The first reception was poor. Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars and wrote that the photography by Kovacs did more than the direction or the script to establish the mood, regretting that nobody besides the cameraman was thinking in those terms. In the same review he found Dennis convincing as a repressed and lonely woman. For a long time it went unmentioned when Altman's work was discussed. From the 2010s it was reassessed and is now counted as the first part of an informal trilogy about female psychology, with Images and 3 Women. Who it is for: viewers who like slow psychological thrillers and are curious where Altman started. Who it is not for: anyone wanting pace. The film proceeds for a long time as though nothing is happening, and it has no aim beyond making you uncomfortable.