Downloading Nancy Review

Posted by Joseph Lee on 06.09.2009

I'd rather download a virus.



Starring:
Maria Bello as Nancy Stockwell
Jason Patric as Louis Farley
Rufus Sewell as Albert Stockwell
Amy Brenneman - Carol, Nancy's psychiatrist

Story: An emotionally disturbed woman meets a man online and they form a pact that he will end her life for her. As they get ready to do this, they fall in love. This complicates matters and the man visits Nancy's husband to get some answers.

Fun Trivia: This film went through numerous casting issues. Holly Hunter, William Hurt, Radha Mitchell and Stellan Skarsgård were originally attached to this project. Jason Patric ended up replacing Ray Liotta, while Rufus Sewell replaced Danny Huston.

Downloading Nancy is a film that has been called many things by many people, and it's true what Sewell said: a lot of people at Sundance last year completely walked out on it and hated it. But now that it's been given a limited release in theaters, does it deserve the disgust it seemingly brings out in audiences? This movie has been called many things from "nasty" to "pointless". I had to find out for myself, so I went out of my way to watch it. I must say that I agree with the Sundance audience and critics.

Nancy is a very disturbed woman. She was abused as a child by her uncle and lives in a shell of a marriage with her emotionally vacant husband. Counseling sessions with Carol, her therapist seem to be going nowhere. So she decides to go onto the internet in search of someone depraved enough to torture and kill her, or in her words, "free her". Louis Farley is that man. She travels to Baltimore and the two begin to plan out how it's going to happen along with sick little torture games thrown in. Meanwhile, her husband barely cares enough to question where she is until days after.

Honestly, I'm wondering how anyone read the script for this film and then decided to greenlight it. The characters are completely unlikable. There is no reason to care what happens to Nancy. She's got so many problems and if maybe they hinted that there was any hope, or any reason why we should want her to live, then maybe it'd be different. But the movie makes her just as disgusting as she imagines herself to be. It's almost as if the filmmakers wanted the audience to sympathize with her to the point that they too, wanted her to die. The script makes the audience feel as emotionally detached from Nancy as her husband does because, again, we are given no reason to care.

Meanwhile, there's also no reason to like Louis, the man who is sick enough that he agrees to kill a woman he's never met and torture her. Let's not get started on Albert, Nancy's husband who seems to only care about golf and never notices that his own wife has been cutting herself. At one point he demands that she just "snap out of it", which is probably the most insensitive thing you can say to a person that is suicidal. How did their marriage get like this? Where they ever happy? There's no way of knowing because the script doesn't dare let anyone have one happy moment. This movie is all about hurting.

The script is ultimately pointless, as has been said elsewhere. This story can't be stretched to a movie. An episode of Forensic Files or a short film, yes, maybe. But not a feature-length motion picture. The movie essentially goes like this: Nancy talks with therapist. Nancy interacts with Louis. Albert is boring. Flashback of Nancy and Albert's unhappy marriage. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It's like a three-note song that just keeps repeating over and over and it is not the least bit interesting.

I thought a movie where the plot is that people fall in love would be intriguing, as these two people form this disturbing pact and then there is hope at at the end. No. The love aspect barely plays into it, and in fact Louis is the only one that feels anything towards Nancy. Nancy is so far gone by this point she is incapable of reciprocating and it gives him the dilemma of whether or not to follow through. A dilemma that they don't spend nearly enough time on (really, they spend five minutes total with him trying to talk her out of it). All we get is Nancy being cut with razors, glass and being forced (as she laughs) to walk through a room with mousetraps. This movie cares not about relationships or giving a message about mental illness. It cares only about shocking the audience simply because it can.

If there is one saving grace of this film, and it's not even one capable of redeeming it, is Mario Bello's performance as Nancy. She does the best she can with a subpar script and gives an emotionally wrecked performance. If Nancy were written to be a little more worthy of an emotional response, then that coupled with Bello's performance could have made this a sad, yet flawed film. Instead, it's just a performance that drowns in a sea of mediocre acting (Patric and Sewell both sleepwalk through this thing), a horrible script and pointless torture scenes. Downloading Nancy is probably the worst film you will see this year.

The 411: Downloading Nancy is a sick and depraved film with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The characters are unlikable, the pacing drags and the content, while tame compared to other films, is just unpleasant. The only redeeming factor is a strong performance from Maria Bello, but that is wasted in a film that's too bleak and really, just a waste of time that could be spent doing something with merit.

Final Score:  1.0   [ Extremely Horrendous ]