Whispers In The Dark

Upscale Manhattan psychiatrist Anne Hecker (Sciorra) is suffering from bad dreams about one of her patients, a self-destructive blonde beauty named Eve Abergray (Deborah Unger) who's heavily into bondage, masochism and exhibitionism. These kinky motifs are deftly combined in the lurid tales Eve tells Anne, which then resurface in Anne's dreams. In these stories, Eve's rough, unnamed lover has been getting out of hand, to the point where he is threatening her life as well as her sanity.

Outside the office, Anne is drifting apart from her drunken and verbally abusive live-in boyfriend Paul (Anthony Heald) and seeking professional counsel from old friends, married psychiatrists Sarah and Leo Green (Alan Alda and Jill Clayburgh). She also begins an affair with dashing pilot Doug McDowell (Jamey Sheridan) that unexpectedly intrudes on her professional life when he's revealed to be Eve's brute lover.

Another of Anne's clients is "Fast" Johnny C. (John Leguizamo), an aspiring Hispanic artist and ex-con rapist. With Anne's help he is trying, with only limited success, to exorcise his misogyny through his art. He may not have much luck getting an NEA grant to paint his graphic pictures of tied-up and disemboweled blondes, but he somehow connects with Eve, a gallery owner and the ideal saleslady for his works among the chic downtown elite. There is thus no shortage of suspects for Detective Morgenstern (Anthony LaPaglia), an NYPD detective with neurotic baggage of his own, when Eve later shows up murdered.

Writer-director Christopher Crowe, whose last significant credit was the similarly lurid Vietnam thriller OFF LIMITS, seems set on saying something about the issue of trust: Anne trusts and mistrusts the wrong people. But WHISPERS IN THE DARK is too unbelievable at the narrative level for its story to carry any kind of thematic weight: Anne gets personally involved with her patients to the point of spying on Eve during a lunch meeting with her lover; later, when Eve reveals to Anne that said lover is dumping her, Anne chooses that moment to dump Eve as a patient, subsequently leaving Eve alone in her office when she goes to make a phone call in the middle of the session. Who can blame Eve for stealing some of Anne's files during the analyst's rude and unprofessional absence? And who can later blame her when she threatens to use those files for dastardly purposes after catching Anne and Doug together?

WHISPERS IN THE DARK gets sillier and less involving as it goes along, with most of the (unintentional) laughs coming from Anne's tendency to stumble on the major plot points about 20 minutes after they have become baldly obvious to every viewer. It becomes apparent, too, that Crowe centered his film on the wrong character. Eve is the only person in this sodden mess who engenders any real sympathy, while the two primary perpetrators who use and abuse her are made to seem the heroes.

The cast, from Sciorra to Alda to Unger and, especially, Clayburgh, lend the proceedings much more class than they deserve--though the poignant vulnerability that Sciorra deployed to good effect in THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE is largely wasted here. Unger shows grace under pressure in a role that requires her, among other things, to disrobe and masturbate in Anne's office. (Violence, profanity, nudity, adult situations.) leave a comment