Brit Mike Figgis here follows up the almost conventional Internal Affairs with a far more relentlessly drab and perverse mystery movie. Architect Kevin Anderson visits dying mother Kim Novak - who is, of course, cast for her Hitchcock associations - in a small town so strange it makes Twin Peaks look like Ambridge, and finds himself unwittingly re-enacting a long-ago love triangle that ended in murder.
Creepy, unsettling scenes follow each other with no logic, while the characters just sit back in the darkness and let things happen to them. It has more rain and shadow than any other melodrama in recent years, and does manage to be genuinely disturbing. Nevertheless, it's worth it for a hair-raising night drive with a drunken Sheriff who drags Anderson to the local brothel, and a weirdly erotic performance from a severely hair-styled Pamela Gidley