[In the following review, Pawelczak asserts that Death and the Maiden lacks the style, imagination, and emotional impact characteristic of Polanski's best films.]

Who is Roman Polanski? Besides a hack writer's dream, that is. His life seems made for the tabloids—childhood victimization by the Nazis in his native Poland, early success as a director, then the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by Charles Manson, and in 1977 his conviction for “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl and subsequent exile in Europe. The Manson connection in particular has made Polanski into a part of pop demonology—people have always assumed that Polanski has a secret life, that he's a habitué of an international, decadent demi-monde, perhaps something like the society of Parisian vampires portrayed in Interview with the Vampire. Polanski himself reinforced the image with his cameo role in Chinatown as the sadistic thug who slashes Jack Nicholson's nostril with a switchblade. So it's not surprising that each new Polanski movie is an occasion for the popular parlor game of spotting the raw slices of Polanski psyche displayed on the screen.

To render Caesar his due right at the beginning—yes, Death and the Maiden does obscurely resonate with the facts of Polanski's life. Guilt, misogyny, rape, fascist oppression—the themes are all there. And when Sigourney Weaver appears alone in an isolated house in a storm, I suppose many viewers will think of Sharon Tate and Manson, the latter our very own gothic monster. But the surprising thing is how becalmed the movie is, how little the material activates Polanski's filmic imagination.

It's not entirely his fault. Based on a play by the Chilean Ariel Dorfman, the screenplay (written by Dorfman and Rafael Yglesias) is full of lifeless dialogue and too pat reversals. The film takes place in an unnamed South American country with a new democratic regime. The reformist president has appointed a human rights commission to investigate the atrocities of the previous regime, but Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) knows it will be a whitewash. When her husband brings home a man who helped him when his car broke down, Paulina thinks she recognizes the doctor (she was blindfolded and only heard his voice) who tortured and raped her in a fascist prison. She clubs him into submission and then ties him to a chair and tapes his mouth—she has now become the interrogator and he's the victim. The rest of the film, which takes place during a single night and is largely confined to the Escobar house, is a three-way psycho drama as Paulina tries to extract a confession from Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley) and convince her husband (Stuart Wilson) to go along with her.

Dorfman's play is theme besotted—it's the kind of writing in which the characters seem like after-thoughts designed to illustrate ideas. And every time some new narrative information or a new theme is introduced, you can hear the gears grind as the whole mechanism shudders and jerks forward. Among the themes are the banality of evil, the connection between fascism and misogyny, and the tendency of people to become what they behold. The man who tortured Paulina liked to play Schubert's “Death and the Maiden” while he raped her, and this provides both a neat emblem for the whole drama and another theme i.e., that the humanities, such as music and literature, don't humanize. (As George Steiner once pointed out, the commandants of the Nazi death camps were cultivated men who listened to Bach and read Goethe during their off-hours.) Unfortunately, Dorfman doesn't bring anything new to these ideas, so we're left with the acting and Polanski's visual treatment to provide whatever bite the film has.

Polanski both mythicizes and humanizes Sigourney Weaver's screen persona. As in the Alien movies, she's once again fighting a monster, but this time it's an all too human monster. Weaver, with her big-boned body and fierce intensity, is like an ancient Fury come back to avenge all the crimes committed against women. Her eerie monomania also has overtones of her performance as Diane Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist, and in Paulina's more deranged moments she recalls the paranoid, homicidal Catherine Deneuve character from Polanski's Repulsion. In one quietly powerful scene, Paulina strips to the waist, and Polanski shoots the scene in such a way that instead of prurience it invites our compassion. Her naked body is somehow unutterably sad and vulnerable—she's really exposed—and when her husband nuzzles her breasts, Polanski focuses on her grief-haunted face. Weaver's performance doesn't have an ounce of audience ingratiation, and if it misses the high notes of classic tragedy which the role clearly implies, I think that's due to the weakness of the script.

As Dr. Miranda, Ben Kingsley doesn't have much to do—for a good deal of the film he's bound and gagged. The movie pretends to make a mystery out of Miranda's guilt or innocence, but enough clues are dropped that the alert viewer won't be very mystified. Kingsley does have one good speech at the end during which you can see reflections of the sulphurous fires within. As Paulina's husband, Stuart Wilson is convincingly confused and uncertain about everything—his feelings for his wife, the situation with Dr. Miranda, and his role as the head of the human rights commision.

Polanski overtly paid homage to Hitchcock in Frantic, but this film has Hitchcockian overtones too. Hitchcock was a master of this kind of cat and mouse game played out on a single set with a small cast of characters. He famously shot Rope in eight long takes, each shot taking us deeper into a labyrinth of twisted motives and delusional hubris. Polanski can't match that performance, and his visual style in this film never quite jells. In past films, he was able to make us feel voyeuristically complicit with his material, but his style here is too cold, too distant and analytic, to draw us in. The film is a respectable effort, perhaps too respectable—it doesn't have that knife slash to the nose.