The relationship of divorced Mary (Natasha Richardson) and her boyfriend Colin (Rupert Everett) has gone stale. Even away from her children in Venice, the two wander oblivious to the sights and pick at each other (some wonderful exchanges courtesy of Harold Pinter; the novel just gives us the gist of their situation at the opening) over meals at outside cafes. One evening, they get up too late to have dinner and get lost in the labyrinthine alleys of the city looking for a cafe and run into dapper, white-suited Robert (Christopher Walken) - who, unbeknownst to them has been following and photographing them - who leads them to a bar. Over breadsticks and wine, he amuses and terrifies them with an anecdote from his childhood (the subject of a recurring monologue narrated by Walken throughout the film). Too drunk to find their hotel, they sleep in an alley and run into Robert again the next day. He insistently invites them to his grand mirrored and mural-glutted palazzo of an apartment where they meet Robert's meek, seemingly terrified wife Caroline (a marvelous performance from Helen Mirren). After a tense dinner with the older couple, Mary and Colin find their sex lives reinvigorated even as they continue to grow emotionally distant. Their ultimate decision of whether to stay together or not when they return to England is irrelevant as Robert and Caroline have something more ominous in store for them.

Harold Pinter took Ian McEwan's (ATONEMENT, ENDURING LOVE, THE INNOCENT) masterful novella and smoothed out little details that wouldn't necessarily transfer to the screen convincingly, gave it a concrete location (Venice, the back of my copy of the book suggests it could easily have been Amsterdam), and added his own layered dialogue; thus freeing director Schrader (CAT PEOPLE, AMERICAN GIGOLO) to concentrate on the spectacular visuals (gold-toned photography by Dante Spinotti, costumes by Giorgio Armani, and Gianni Quaranta's amazingly detailed reproduction of a Venetian palazzo). After his work for David Lynch, Angelo Badalementi provides an atypical orchestral score accented with Turkish motifs. The film's sting-in-the-tail ending is unpredictable and leaves the viewer with unanswered questions to mull over long after.