Product Description

Julia Roberts tries to escape an abusive husband by faking her death. But eventually her past catches up with her in this suspenseful and scary drama.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7887 in DVD
• Brand: TCFHE
• Released on: 2003-09-02
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 99 minutes

Amazon.com
This 1991 thriller by Joseph Ruben (True Believer) works up to a point: Julia Roberts plays an abused wife who fakes her death and starts anew under a different identity in Iowa. Her psychopathic husband (Patrick Bergin) figures it out and stalks her and her new boyfriend (Kevin Anderson). The best part of the film is the moody isolation of Roberts's life with Bergin. Ruben ingeniously stakes out the story by presenting what looks like an ideal life between the two--a nice house on the ocean, a seemingly healthy sex life, etc.--and then, whammo! Vital to the plot but less interesting is everything afterward, but that's less an inherent script problem than it is obvious studio pressure to push Roberts as a cute star. There's even a sequence where the actress tries on a series of hats while Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" plays on the soundtrack. Such insistent valentines to Roberts destroys most of Ruben's momentum and the film's credibility, and the project never quite recovers. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Trying to teach!
This is a great movie that I think is trying to teach the world that this kind of abuse does exist. It is very hard to get out and stay safe and there should be strong laws about violence. There isn't ever enough protection when you try to get out of that kind of relationship. Most times it does come down to him or you. This is so sad that people still don't get it and the laws can't help.

GUILTY PLEASURE
Joseph Ruben has fashioned a by-the-numbers, glossy, engrossing, if trashy and predictable, thriller. It is imminently watchable, of course, and features the mega-watt smile of our fave, Julia Roberts, who improbably dons theatrical costumes in the midst of a semi-breakdown to the tune of Brown-Eyed Girl. The men around Julia, both her over-the-top psychopathic husband and her would-be new, soft boyfriend (Patrick Bergin and Kevin Andersen, respectively) are completely dispensable, and Ruben knows this: he keeps us monumentally focused on the beguiling Ms. Roberts throughout. It is easy to forget and forgive lapses in credibility (there are many), and the opening twenty minutes have a glossy, antiseptic queasiness about them that seem to be setting up a much more deft and daring thriller. All of that vanishes, along with common sense, but it hardly matters. This movie is one you can watch over and over and over again, a bunch of chips nearby: it moves quickly, harmlessly, and gives you what you want when you just don't feel much like thinking.

Scissor-Cut Look at Abuse
With the beginning scene in "Sleeping With the Enemy" of a nice, handsome husband and a beautiful, smiling wife living in a lovely, rich house, this movie soon breaks the stereotype perception of an abusive relationship by showing that everything that glitters is not necessarily gold.

Julia Roberts, with a combination of a sense of planning and cleverness, fear and hope, and a desperate will to survive, does the only thing she can - she leaves while faking her own death. (Any abused man or woman will probably be mesmerized by some of the scenes and the feelings evoked in this intense movie.)

The new lifestyle she slowly, but surely creates for herself, against the backdrop of her husband piecing together her escape and his savage determination to find her creates a savvy suspense thriller that could be a classic in anyone's home movie library.