Average Rating: 3.8/10
Reviews Counted: 29
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 24
Unseemly, unsettling, and unremittingly bleak, Downloading Nancy is slickly made but mostly unpleasant.
Average Rating: 2.6/10
Critic Reviews: 8
Fresh: 0 | Rotten: 8
Unseemly, unsettling, and unremittingly bleak, Downloading Nancy is slickly made but mostly unpleasant.
liked it
Average Rating: 2.9/5
User Ratings: 8,757
A self-destructive housewife takes what may be her final step into the abyss in this independent psychological drama. Nancy Stockwell (Maria Bello) is a woman edging into her forties who has fallen into a deep and prolonged state of depression, finding her only solace in self-inflicted pain. Nancy has grown weary of her relationship with her husband, Albert (Rufus Sewell), and one day he comes home from work to find a note in which Nancy says she's decided to visit an old friend for a few days.
Jan 21, 2008 Wide
Jan 12, 2010
Strand Releasing
All Critics (29) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (6) | Rotten (24) | DVD (2)
You can't really blame Bello for taking every chance available to let her monster talent off its chain, even when the opportunity takes the form of something so ill conceived and unworthy (and dull and ridiculous) as Downloading Nancy.
Some suspense arises about just how far the woman's sickness will take her, but it's overwhelmed by the pointlessness of the story.
Downloading Nancy is a nasty exploitation flick tarted up with art-house actors and psychobabble.
What makes the movie a trial to sit through isn't just the heroine's pain-freak tastes. It's that a kinkfest with this blah an emotional spectrum is selling its own chic form of puritanism -- sex with all the life force repressed.
Not only does it waste the audience's time with 102 minutes of misery and despair, but it also trashes the talents of four fine actors who should have stayed in bed reading better screenplays that deserve attention and enhance careers.
When you peel away this film's complex performances, at the core of its drawn-out suicide spectacle is pain so extreme, so alienating, and, in the end, so pointless.
A tawdry tale which suggests that in the Internet Age, if you're contemplating suicide but can't quite summon up the nerve to do yourself in, you might surf S&M chat rooms to find a sadist whose fetish corresponds with your masochistic tendencies.
Tortuous, painful, confusing, contrived. It's enough to put the viewer on the couch.
Bello throws herself into Nancy admirably. Yet the film squanders her talents, and what's left of our patience, en route to a finale that is neither surprising nor illuminating: Like the rest of the movie, it's misery for misery's sake.
A film that may be too heavy for its own good. Christopher Doyle fans will love it while tolerating the harshness of the story.
Director Johan Renck essentially builds Nancy and Albert's reality out of an aggregation of overwrought kitsch... and so what seem like occasional lapses into deadpan moments of fantasy aren't always productive in contrast. Heavily art directed for unplea
Boasts a raw, brave performance by Maria Bello and a stylish cinematography, but suffers from too much style over substance. Its dull, stilted screenplay has poorly developed characters and lacks any real suspense.
Maria Bello and Jason Patric in a world of pain.
An amazing example of talented actors doing their best to make something genuine of a complex concept but being betrayed by writers and a director who seem afraid to really let the film connect.
Maria Bello's courageous performance should find critical admiration but will not be enough for this spare and difficult drama to find much of an audience in its limited theatrical runs.
A chilly, bleak film about characters so programmatic that their plight is easy to shrug off.
creates a deadening sense of ennui not through empathy or lived-in performances, but tedium.
For all the bad behavior on display, the emotional stakes remain hazily defined.
A tawdry tale which suggests that in the Internet Age, if you're contemplating suicide but can't quite summon up the nerve to do yourself in, you might surf S&M chat rooms to find a sadist whose fetish corresponds with your masochistic tendencies.
An emotionally sterile and self-serious terminal disease drama without a moment of levity to be found from first frame to last.
Most films that explore sadomasochism do so in ways that can still be appealing and alluring to an audience comprised of people with relatively normal, well-adjusted ideas about sex and sexuality, but this is a notable exception. The sadomasochistic scenes in Downloading Nancy are fucking brutal, cringe-worthy, and
December 10, 2010
Super Reviewer
First of all, this film is by no means a feel good, popcorn popping piece of cinema. It's a rather dark, disturbing tale shot in quite dismal premises to tell a story that is real, but not one people want to hear. However, I was glued to the screen due to the brilliant acting performances by Maria Bello and Jason
August 27, 2009Super Reviewer
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