Mesmerized Reviews

Shot in New Zealand by American writer-director Michael Laughlin (STRANGE BEHAVIOR), this obscure feature casts Jodie Foster as the unwilling 19th-century bride and accused killer of a coarse, much older businessman. Tamarind Grove, New Zealand, 1880: Victoria Thompson (Foster) is on trial for her life, accused of poisoning her husband, Oliver (John Lithgow). Flashback: Almost two decades earlier, a baby girl is delivered to St. Paul's Foundling Home by her well-off grandfather; he provides funds for her care but insists that she know nothing of her origins. When asked the infant's name, he responds that she has none. Eighteen years later, the orphanage's matrons arrange Victoria's marriage to merchant Oliver Thompson (John Lithgow). Though Victoria imagines that married life will be an improvement, she soon learns otherwise: Oliver is coarse and belligerent; he spies on his young wife and accuses her of putting on airs. His equally crude father (Harry Andrews) makes no secret of his belief that all women are whores. Victoria takes refuge among the puppies in Oliver's kennels and in an unseemly friendship with her sensitive brother-in-law, George (Dan Shor). Inevitably, Victoria and George try to flee together; Oliver and his father catch them at the docks and in the ensuing struggle, Oliver kills George… or so Victoria is led to believe. George is in fact alive, but Oliver and his father claim to have covered up his murder, which would otherwise have been blamed on her. They use the threat of exposure to keep Victoria in line. More wretched than ever, Victoria becomes pregnant and delivers a stillborn baby; her evident desperation touches the offbeat Reverend James Wilson (Michael Murphy), who encourages Victoria to cultivate her mind and gives her a book on hypnosis. Victoria's discovery that George is still alive inspires a desperate plan to escape her miserable life. Purportedly based on an actual case, this slow-moving psychological drama hints at perverse depths that are never explored -- the question of how, exactly, Oliver came to know of Victoria is especially uncomfortable -- and leaves Foster scrambling to make psychological sense of a woman who condemns her husband to a protracted, excruciating death because he's a boor. It's tempting to imagine what Polish writer-director Jerzy Skolimowski -- credited with the "original work" from which Laughlin fashioned his screenplay -- might have made of this psychosexual stew, but what wound up on the screen is tedious stuff.