[In the following review of Death and the Maiden, Horne asserts that Polanski's film improves upon the stage play through powerful cinematic technique, heightened realism, and a tightened narrative structure.]

In Fritz Lang's tour de force of purposeful plotting, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt of 1956, a journalist conspires with his editor to plant circumstantial evidence and have himself sentenced to death for a recent murder in order, at the last moment, to reveal his innocence and discredit the judicial process. It finally transpires that the journalist is an ingenious schemer, and not innocent of the crime; but most of the film, we realize with a chill, would be the same whether he is innocent or guilty. In fact, although the journalist's demonstration of the unsound basis of the death penalty is undertaken in the worst faith, Lang's dark liberal film puts its own triumphantly through: the suspenseful twists towards the end are grounded in a painful irony about the judicial process and the puzzling blankness of appearances. Jacques Rivette's marvelous, high-flown response to Lang's dialectical construction invoked Hegel's “pure negative”, dwelling on the dizzying effect of watching a film and knowing that it would look the same if the meaning of its action was reversed (the philosophical appeal of the whodunnit).

Ariel Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden, first performed in 1990, attracted extraordinary praise for its dramatization of the ambiguous moral predicament of a woman, Paulina, whose life has been crippled by the tortures and multiple rapes she underwent—always to a record of the Schubert quarter of the title—under a Latin American dictatorship years before. A new, uncertain, democratic government, as the play opens, has appointed Paulina's lawyer-husband head of a commission investigating human-rights violations—though not her case, only those ending in death. A stranger, Dr Roberto Miranda, who has helped her husband when his car broke down, comes back to their remote house by the sea and she recognizes, she thinks, his voice and pet phrases as those of the doctor who supervised her torture and repeatedly raped her. Before her horrified, ambivalent, law-respecting husband Gerardo, the ex-victim, gun in hand, violently initiates a private show-trial, turning prosecutor, persecutor, interrogator and—possibly—murderer. Under threat, Dr Miranda supplies a confession—only insisting, however, that Gerardo, who reluctantly acts in his defence, obtains the atrocious facts for him from Paulina, so that he can confess the violations correctly (whether he's innocent or guilty, this makes perfect sense). She thus probably can't be certain that the extorted confession is as genuine as she claims it to be. And Paulina may finally kill her persecutor/victim; but in a portentous, never-resolved cliffhanger, she freezes as the lights go down. In the coda, where she sees him again in the audience at a Schubert concert, “He could be real or he could be an illusion in Paulina's head”.

Whereas Lang's compact, realistic masterpiece observes a dry forensic distance from its characters and economically gives a plot-function to every detail—even the discussions of the death penalty—Dorfman's play, which sometimes falls into an emphatic earnest liberal clunkiness, often seems embarrassed by the whodunnit framework which is its real strength, and moves towards the showily impressive symbolic gesture (most intrusively in the lowering of a mirror at the end, “forcing the members of the audience to look at themselves”).

Such overt moments of theatrical self-consciousness are eliminated in Roman Polanski's masterly film adaptation of Death and the Maiden, with a fine cast whose performances are rich in contrasts. The heroic, risk-taking Hollywood star, Sigourney Weaver, plays Paulina against two Britons, Stuart Wilson as Gerardo and Ben Kingsley as Dr Miranda. Polanski and co-scenarist Raphael Yglesias (and, to some extent, Dorfman himself), have changed the original, including the end, a good deal: “In the film, we had to inject realism where the play stayed very artificial, not to say conventional.” One remains, seldom uncomfortably, conscious of the theatrical derivation: Polanski's tales of sexual entrapment always gravitate to the huis clos. There is just one scene—on the terrace—where Sigourney Weaver does look uncomfortable, insistent and busy when Polanski's long, attentive take requires concentration and underplaying. Otherwise she is excellent, above all when listening (recognizing Miranda's voice with a desperate sniff). Wilson, meanwhile, is quietly virtuosic, Kingsley creepily, brilliantly ambiguous.

Polanski's intent curiosity about his characters, not without its voyeuristic edge, leads him to attempt to imagine their lives not in the rather bare, stylized, Pinteresque manner of the play but with the kind of domestic and intimate detail that is powerfully visible to a camera tracking them around a fully furnished, inhabited house. The film is rich in violent, sensuous close-ups—of a plateful of food shovelled into a bin, of Paulina's heavy metallic gun, of the contents of a kitchen drawer being rummaged for interrogation aids. An actor himself, Polanski refuses the fixity of storyboards and rehearses each scene to get it right before placing the camera, so that the image moves and cuts to follow what he finds himself watching in the characters' behaviour.

Both locally and in construction, Polanski intricately readjusts and re-weights the play; more successfully a thriller, paced out with shocks and turns, the film also has a keener eye, directing our attention so closely, for the loaded details of behaviour. Gagging Miranda (with her panties—the most Polanskian thing in the original play), Paulina bites off a length of parcel tape, practically kissing him in the process, a trace of the fantasized revenge-rape which anatomy prohibits. While the Schubert tape plays and Gerardo tries to persuade Miranda to confess, Paulina prowls on the terrace. There is a fine concentrated moment where Miranda turns to look out, the music surges, and Paulina appears in the window. Miranda's terrified response may be innocent, but may imaginably reflect his guilty memory of what that musical pulse once—or fourteen times—meant sexually. Miranda's unpleasant blend of misogyny and courtliness perhaps does imply, without proving, a past as a torturer-rapist, but the cynicism unsettlingly finds an echo (“Fuck women!”) in Gerardo, beyond dispute a devoted husband, when he thinks himself abandoned by Paulina.

Polanski has said that he instantly recognized the weakness of Dorfman's third act, full of theatrical fades and dissolves and blurrings of the line between fantasy and reality; and the film's symmetrical construction, framed in flashback from the Schubert concert, gives a stronger, more logical shape. Ingenious business with the cutting-off of telephone and electricity permits beautifully-integrated surprises, and cleverly compresses the time-scheme to impose urgency on the action. The doubling of Miranda's confession suggests a progression from false to true, but permits the other reading Polanski has sketched: “One can indeed imagine that to save his skin, an innocent man should be obliged to invent a very convincing confession.” In the play, it seems indicated that Miranda is guilty.

Polanski's film is beautifully constructed. Full of strong human feeling, alert to the grotesque ironies of situations and the possibilities of humiliation, it is unsettling and involving. It cares much more than the play for the integrity of character, and embeds its action more plausibly in a web of circumstance—to the point where reflection on the situation opens up a kaleidoscope of possible perspectives and makes one curious to watch again. One must say that, in so far as in reality Miranda must be either innocent or guilty, it remains just a little unsatisfying and blurred compared with the clear double logic of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. But perhaps the film knows what he did or didn't do, and just isn't telling us—which would be like life.