Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Better Late Then Never

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

When an unknown man with amnesia (Spader) is washed up on a secluded beach of Northern Ireland, he is taken in by a solitary eccentric spinster (Brochet)and it becomes immediately apparent that she has "control issues." Since he has a broken leg, he's temporarily at her mercy and tries to humor her as she becomes increasingly strange. Brochet plays "Sarah" so well that the viewer soon surmises that beneath her elfin winsomeness lies some dangerous emotional and mental instability which will eventually erupt. She succeeds in seducing the stranger and thereafter regards him as her personal possession. The arguments with her old harpy of a mother are telling. When the couple have a special candlelit dinner commemorating his sexual surrender, she appears wearing a weird lacy gown strongly suggesting the mad Miss Havisham in "Great Expectations." Viewer interest will be maintained until the inevitable tragic result of the man breaking free of the coerced relationship which bears a familiar parallel in reverse to "The Collector."

We enjoyed this movie quite a lot. Anne Brochet's character, Sarah, was a spinster, a psycho, yet quite erotic. James Spader is always good, and he did a great job going from confused to falling in love to fearing for his life.There were a couple of strange problems that ruined things for us a little, though. The story was set in the islands off Ireland, yet Anne Brochet did not try to hide her strong French accent. I don't remember an explanation of her being French. Her mother appeared as a ghost, and her mother had an English accent. Huh???The sex scenes were great, Anne Brochet has a fantastic body. We didn't think they were overdone or gratuitous.Overall, it was a great movie. Intriguing and a nice look inside the mind of a strange, isolated person. Was the plot predictable? Yes. But that's okay sometimes.

I thought that this movie was lovely, it had a great plot and the actors did their jobs well. I don't think that this was a slow movie. I would suggest that any human watch Driftwood if they want to see a beautiful yet tragic film.

I really think that this movie might have been classified as one of James Spader's great movies if the story line wasn't so screwed up and half the movie wasn't based on sex alone. The movie concerns a lonely French girl who finds a shipwrecked sailor and tries to keep him for herself. The movie would be believable except it's quite impossible for 2 people to jump into bed and suddenly be in love with each other. I think the movie itself was quite good, cast well and filmed well with attention paid more to acting than material detail. Get rid of the mentally disturbed and the distasteful sex and you've got a great movie.