maxm-14863 Plot: Divorced mom and teen daughter don't get along. Strange man lives in daughter's closet and appears to be her primary companion. Strange man meets mother and starts affair with her. Daughter becomes jealous. Mom discovers that strange man lives in daughter's closet. Strange man threatens mom and daughter. Mom attacks strange man with tennis racket. Dad pulls unconscious strange man out of Mom's house and asks strange man if they went too far. Dad then bandages strange man's forehead and returns to mom's house to mop up blood from Mom's kitchen. Theme(s): People get divorced, and bad things happen. Check your children's' closets more than annually. If you only know the person's first name, don't have sex with them. Men are in cahoots with one another to make women's lives miserable and deserve to have their skulls smashed in with a metal tennis racket.

lazarillo It must be hard being the mother of a teenage girl. You have to worry about drinking and drugs, bullying from other girls, boys and pregnancy. And in the UK you also apparently have to worry about your daughter hiding a naked, older male ex-convict in her closet! The main conceit of this movie is so bizarre that from the get-go it almost immediately has to be either unadulterated exploitation (the only other film I've seen with this plot is the sleazy 70's softcore porn flick "Sister Emanuelle") or a surreal art film. This definitely starts out pretty surreal, but then it turns into a more-or-less straight drama for awhile before an ending that is even MORE surreal and ridiculous. I can't say I disliked it though simply because I've never seen anything quite like it before.After hiding this strange man in her closet for some reason, the girl (Laura Greenwood) is perturbed when her new "friend" leaves the closet and introduces himself in another context to her divorced mother (Rachel Blake)who she is at constant loggerheads with. This leads to an affair between the ex-convict and the mother, which the daughter is not so happy about. This whole thing here sounds like some kind of mother-daughter sex fantasy, but there is never really a sexual relationship between the convict and the daughter (despite him living naked in her closet at the beginning of the movie). There is some definite sexual tension, but a surprising lack of sex.Rachel Blake and, especially, Laura Greenwood are quite good. The actor playing the ex-con is Eastern European and not always a particularly easy to understand. Interestingly, he's the main sex object in the movie, not either of the women. There is also a fourth character--the father/ex-husband--who becomes increasingly important as the movie progresses and figures prominently in the even more bizarre ending. This is not a great movie, but it's definitely interesting.

daniel-611 At first I thought it must be written by a woman, because of a dark, mysterious man who ends up in the midst of a mother and daughter who live alone... You don't know what to make of him. At first he's just there and no one can speak of him. There is sexual tension. Then he begins to pry deeper into their lives, more sexual tension ignites, then jealousy and then just plain strangeness. At this point the plot can have gone anywhere, but it really doesn't do anything interesting. There is a twist at the end that revealed to me nothing more than that my instinct that it was written by a woman was wrong. The writer must obviously be a man, I thought. And one who must think he's very clever, and wants to think he's in control of his characters, but really he doesn't know what to do with them and he never created a decent plot for them anyway... in the end he unravels them into a morass and leaves them that way. Some people might like this movie for it's suspense, but it just barely kept my attention and I was disappointed with the anti-climactic ending. It was made around the same time as Chloe and has a similar theme. The difference is that Chloe was written by a woman, so it's a woman rather than a man who is tasked with manipulating the other characters.

jhs39 I'm not really sure what to think of this one. Peculiar thriller/drama starts off with scenes of a strained teenage girl and her mother who clearly don't get along driving together. When the girl is in her room it turns out there is an escaped convict dressed only in his undershorts hidden in her closet who she feeds, does provocative exercises in front of and flirts with. Given the unlikeliness of the situation you figure at first that the man is a figment of the girl's imagination, but then he turns up at one of her mother's adult education classes and talks the older woman into letting him sleep on the pull out sofa as a guest, which the daughter has extremely mixed feelings about. The only other character in more than a couple of scenes is the girl's remote, estranged father who is a doctor and who left the family for reasons that are never fully made clear. Without giving any more of the plot away by the end of the movie I really didn't know what was going on or if the escaped convict was even that, since he seems like he might actually be the most psychologically healthy person in the film. The final shot is undeniably creepy, but like the rest of the film it begs more questions than it answers. The actresses who play the mother and daughter and both excellent and go a long way towards making their characters seem credible even though none of their actions really is. If you're looking for a head-scratcher this will likely fit the bill just fine, but audiences expecting a thriller will likely be bored and disappointed.