Bill Skarsgard in Hemlock Grove (Netflix)

"So, what's it like living on abandoned island with your vampire family?" The Observer asked 22-year-old Bill Skarsgård, star of the new Netflix original series Hemlock Grove. (Out today! Consume it!) We were at No. 8, where the lanky Mr. Skarsgård was partying with his co-star, Landon Liboiron, and the show's co-creator, Brian McGreevy, who also wrote the book on which the series is based.

Mr. Skarsgård looked slightly offended. "We don't live on an island," he said.

Our bad: We thought we had read it somewhere, like in the 2011 GQ interview that described father Stellan Skarsgård as follows:

Think George Clooney—if George Clooney was the only internationally famous actor in an entire country with a tradition of revering actors.

This was mostly a set-up to explain why the eight Skarsgård children spent their vacations on a private family island (try not to think about Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) in Öland, next to the Baltic sea.

"It's connected to the mainland by a bridge," Mr. Skarsgård said in his defense.

"That still counts as an island," we told him.

It says something that the heavy-lidded, thick-lipped actor chose to argue semantics over the whole island thing, we thought. Especially because his older brother, Alexander Skarsgård, happens to be one of the most famous vampires in the world right now, playing Eric Northman on True Blood. On Hemlock Grove, Bill follows in his brother's footsteps, playing the aristocratic, Oedipal (and a lot of other things) teen vampire Roman Godfrey.

When pressed, Mr. Skarsgård revealed his true form. "Yeah, we're a family of vampires, Swedish vampires, being bred on a secret island," he said.

Finally, the truth! But here was the real test of whether he could go toe-to-toe with his brother and father: how was his American accent?

"Pretty bad. I have this kind of bullshit accent that I've made up," he said, sounding vaguely European. "Swedish is a sexy language, but the Swedish accent is the most unsexy thing in the world."

Still, a family of tall, brooding, Swedish vampires? One could find a worse family to marry into.

Mara and Craig.

In the blood-soaked hands of the hair-raising, always surprising director David Fincher, the creepy remake of Sweden’s grisly thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is dreary and confusing but technically superb—a darkly photographed and superbly acted film. It is not my cup of bitter tea laced with arsenic, but I admire its tenacity in keeping the viewer dazzled, while the toxic effect of its violence, sometimes unwatchable, left me charged. I hated the 2009 Swedish film version, my dashed attempt to read the book (the first volume in the crime trilogy by the late, overrated Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson) put me to sleep faster than a double-dose of Dalmane, and I still don’t understand why it has been recycled in an estimated $100 million remake as unnecessary as it is unoriginal. It is also impossibly long-winded. When it ended, after just under a whopping three hours, I ended up impressed, in spite of my reservations. If I had found it even half as incomprehensible as it is, I might have liked it twice as much.

Oh, my god, that plot. After being investigated for making licentious mistakes in fact-checking a magazine profile that causes a scandal, the controversial, complicated and egotistical journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) loses his job, apartment, moral compass and most of his sanity. Then he spends the rest of this interminable, head-scratching thriller trying not to lose his life and everything below his gym-ready waistline and above his walnut-cracking thighs in one scene of nasty brutality after another. He’s crafty, but he’s also a two-fisted fool for getting recruited by Swedish industrial tycoon Henrik Vanger (a wasted Christopher Plummer) to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece Harriet, who disappeared 40 years ago from a family reunion on a sinister island with an unpronounceable name off the coast of Sweden. The case was never solved, but Vanger believes she was murdered by a member of his own dysfunctional family. Here the brain-twisting plot begins to get delusional. As the reporter begins to unravel multiplying clues, he tracks down and hires Lisbeth Salander (newcomer Rooney Mara), a chain-smoking, motorcycle-riding Goth lesbian computer hacker shrouded in black leather whose invasion of his hard drive reveals the errors that have tanked his career. This zombie is a real creep workout, replete with body piercings, a dragon tattoo that encircles her body and more rings around her eyes than a rabid raccoon.

Sharing a deserted cottage by the sea in a gray, frozen Swedish winter, the reporter and his freaked-out researcher, equipped with his-and-her laptops, dig up newspaper reports from the year Harriet disappeared, connecting an entire series of homicides, and before you can yell “Holy Whitechapel Ripper!” the Vanders turn out to be a whole family of serial killers! There’s Henrik’s brother, a Nazi who died in 1940, and the brother’s son, Gottfried, and grandson, Martin (Stellan Skarsgård), the latter two of whom continually raped and sodomized Harriet, Martin’s sister, who moved to Australia and is living under the assumed name of her cousin Anita. It takes an hour and a half before the two stars of this bizarre puzzle meet and he hires her to look up all the other women who have been murdered under similar circumstances, all raped and killed, all with names from the Bible and linked by verses from Leviticus. Then, under pressure, they end up in bed in a savage sexual fury—an unconvincing twist, since Lisbeth has endured a lifetime of rape and sexual torture herself, and despises men. (We’ve just seen her sewing up an eye with dental floss, tying up a victim and tattooing “I AM A RAPIST PIG” on his chest with a carving knife.) Reckless, hostile and pretty close to being a serial killer herself, she’s seriously damaged, exacting gruesome revenge on anyone who crosses her, but when it comes to her boss, she melts, saving a naked Mr. Craig from an unbearably convincing basement torture chamber that leaves nothing to the imagination.

I’m a big fan of the kind of sleaze and terror David Fincher is famous for (think Se7en and Fight Club) and this is no exception. The great screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s elaborate, convoluted script, so muddled that even after it’s over you still don’t know what it’s all about, is a drawback—but the movie is a master class in sinister style, tense and deeply uncomfortable. The cold Swedish dreamscape of blackness is so effective that sometimes you feel like you need a flashlight. Mr. Fincher also knows how to bring out the fearlessness in actors. As James Bond, Mr. Craig is a terrific mixture of sarcastic charm and sartorial splendor, in or out of the sack, but when the role calls for something darker, he’s equally well equipped. Mr. Skarsgård is especially scary because of the sheer exploitation of power with which he manipulates people under the guise of polite, amiable calm—making his later scenes from friendly to ferocious doubly shocking. Ms. Mara is a damaged ferret, her eyes darting, her tongue rubbing her stapled lips as she helps the mentally distraught reporter try to make sense of a deepening mystery. It all adds up to a noxious brew of teeth-grinding, knuckle-whitening brutality. Merry Christmas to you, too.

rreed@observer.com

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Running time 158 minutes

Written by Steven Zaillian and Stieg Larsson

Directed by David Fincher

Starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara and Stellan Skarsgård

2.5/4

Amid the summer junk-movies that are already going down in history as artifacts, some folks will welcome, I suppose, the nauseating cornball music of the Swedish pop group ABBA which pounds its way through the monumentally inconsequential Mamma Mia! To me, the popularity of the jukebox blather of this gang of no-talents is only slightly less understandable than the war in Iraq. And the movie they’ve made of the bafflingly popular tourist attraction still playing on Broadway is only slightly more unbearable than finding myself the real-life star of all the Saw movies rolled into one. Like the show, there’s a lot of bumping, jerking, twitching, shrieking and jumping up and down while pretending to have fun, but the entire cast of misguided pros look like they just woke up in a bed of red ants.

You could write the plot on the head of an ice pick, which is exactly what Catherine Johnson, adapting her original book to the screen from a “concept” by Judy Craymer, has done. If you’ve been subjected to one of the productions already staged in 170 cities and in eight different languages, you know it’s about a disgraced, pregnant and very unwed American pop singer (played by a woefully miscast Meryl Streep) who moved to Greece to have a daughter and run a rotting hotel. That was 20 years earlier. Now the little girl has grown into a lovely bride-to-be (Amanda Seyfried, from the TV series Big Love) who invites three of her mom’s old one-night stands to the wedding, hoping to discover which one is her father. Everyone finds love in time for an admittedly beautiful Greek sunset—and yet another in an endless parade of club-footed dances amateurishly choreographed and numbingly directed by Phyllida Lloyd. That’s it. End of story. But the boring, lugubrious hit parade of nauseating pop songs just drags on and on, droning into a threatened eternity of bathos.

Bring earplugs. The first of many fatal mistakes in this misbegotten mush was allowing the actors to do their own singing. Ms. Streep has sung before, but her musical voice is weirdly uneven here. The others are so out of tune that every time they open their mouths, you wince. A far more experienced musical cast might have given it some precision, but as the actors arrive, one by one, on the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi, they don’t seem amusingly conflicted by the wedding chaos, just tormented. This cruelty only heightens the weakness of the material. Nothing has been tailored to fit the particular talents of the cast. They’ve all been thrown into a shark-infested pool to sink or swim. To put it mildly, they float like fishy mammals auditioning for the role of a beached whale.

Donna, the Streep role, depends mainly on an earthy charm of which the actress might have been capable if she had had a decent director. She’s merely static and tentative, flapping her arms all over the scenery like someone attacked by a swarm of killer bees. Watching her desperately trying to bring to life a character that is essentially cardboard is one of the year’s more embarrassing challenges. Her frantic cohorts lack the ease to take up the required slack. The other two members of her old vocal group, Donna and the Dynamos, turn up as bitchy, drunken gorgons (Christine Baranski and Julie Walters) who slug ouzo and flounce and bounce like drag queens. Not good drag queens from Greenwich Village. More like bad drag queens from open-mike cabaret night at the Des Moines Holiday Inn airport lounge. Worst of all, meet the three possible Dads, played by Pierce Brosnan, who gets the big love songs but can’t carry a tune in a paper bag; serious Lars von Trier veteran Stellan Skarsgård, who looks blank and uncomfortable throughout; and dashing Colin Firth, who, for no reason except an excuse to give his character a proper exit, falls in love with a man. None of them can sing, and nothing they do looks natural. Rarely have I witnessed so many pros appear so clueless.

Anything in Mamma Mia! that risks becoming an actual scene only serves as another song cue. The result is a farrago of fake tunes, plagued with sophomoric lyrics, noisy and flat and begging to be burned (“Don’t go wasting your emotion … sharing your devotion … Lay all your love on me,” shouted by dancing beach boys in snorkel flippers) followed by more tunes (“I’ve played all my cards … Nothing more to say/ No more ace to play … The winner takes it all/ The loser has to fall”) and even more tunes (“I believe in angels/ Something good in everything I see … when I know the time is right for me”) while the Greek peasants stop tending their goats to sing “Oom-pa-pa” in the background. I mean, are they kidding? Are people now so removed from real music that they actually sing along with this sentimental bilge? It’s all supposed to impart a smiley-face feeling of lighthearted innocence, but it just looks stupid. The joy is metallic and the energy is forced, but look at it this way: The payroll checks were astronomical, and they all got a great vacation in the Greek islands. Making movies—even godawful dogs like Mamma Mia!—still beats pushing a sausage cart down the streets of a broiling New York summer.

rreed@observer.com

Magali (Béatrice Romand), a45-year-oldwidowand wine maker, is the intended beneficiary of a manhunt by her best friend, Isabelle (Marie Rivière), a comfortably married bookseller with more than a little time on her hands. Magali's son and daughter have flown the coop and her vineyard for romantic liaisons elsewhere in the Rhône region. Magali's only other friend is Rosine (Alexia Portal), her son's hot-and-cold girlfriend. After Rosine has confided to Magali that she has had an affair with Étienne (Didier Sandre), her philosophy professor, Magali strangely tells Isabelle that she adores Rosine and feels that she is much too good and bright for her devil-may-care son, Léo. Sealing this bond of exclusively female friendship, Rosine tells Léo that she loves Magali more than she loves him. Can one imagine such a situation in an American movie?

As for Étienne, Rosine meets clandestinely and platonically with him, until one day she refuses to continue seeing him until he marries an older but still desirable woman, specifically the ever unsuspecting Magali, who is too stubborn and demanding to participate in another matrimonial steeplechase. Isabelle, also playing matchmaker, has placed a carefully worded personal ad seeking an eligible middle-aged male interested in marriage.

In the frenzied background are the preparations for the marriage of Isabelle's daughter, and for the reception afterward on Isabelle's large estate, the eventual venue for Magali's "accidental" meeting with the two suitors, unknown to her and to each other. This could be the set up for a madcap Georges Feydeau (1862-1921) farce, but there is too much life-and-death gravity in Mr. Rohmer's characters for mindless chaos to intrude.

Alain Libolt as Gérald, the man who answers the ad thinking he is courting one woman (Isabelle posing as Magali) when he is actually being screened for another, gives the picture's revelatory performance with a discreet mixture of charm, sincerity, dignity, seriousness, intelligence and an almost but not quite comical ability to adapt to surprises and necessary compromises. The cream of the jest is that Gérald, the right man for Magali, has also aroused jealously envious feelings in the supposedly coolheaded and manipulative Isabelle, who has played the role of Magali's benevolent friend much too effectively.

Mr. Rohmer's sharpest departure in Autumn Tale from his traditional modus operandi of finding brand-new performers for each of his movies is in recasting his two middle-aged women co-protagonists with Marie Rivière as Isabelle and Béatrice Romand as Magali. In their younger days, Ms. Rivière played the stormy romantic leads in La Femme de l'Aviateur (1980) and Le Rayon Vert (1986). Ms. Romand was unforgettably poignant as the rejected adolescent in Claire's Knee (1970), and unforgettably insufferable as a fantasy-driven, husband-hungry female predator pursuing and persecuting an unwilling male candidate of her own choosing in Le Beau Mariage (1982).

Though Ms. Rivière and Ms. Romand do not play their youthful characters grown older in Autumn Tale , their iconic aging still resonates for those of us who have followed Mr. Rohmer's career religiously, and perhaps even for Mr. Rohmer himself. He may have felt more comfortable dealing with this unfamiliar age group (for him) if he could draw upon his past experiences with both actresses when they were young. Hence, Ms. Rivière is still a bit wacky and presumptuous, and Ms. Romand is still a bit vulnerable and quixotic, in their more mature incarnations. The point is that Autumn Tale is not a good movie merely because so many other current movies are bad. It is a good movie, period. See it, please.

Generation Gasp

Udayan Prasad's My Son the Fanatic , from a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, based on a short story by Mr. Kureishi, is a film that absorbed me as I was watching it, even when I did not fully understand all its details and nuances.

First of all, I am not sure if the milieu is Anglo-Pakistani or Anglo-Indian. Om Puri plays the central point-of-view role of Parvez, a taxi driver who has spent 25 years in the industrial north of England and who does a great deal of business ferrying prostitutes and their clients, often watching in the rearview mirror as they consummate their carnal transactions. Parvez, however, does not seem to be contaminated by his sleazy surroundings. On the contrary, he is introduced as a strong family man with a seemingly submissive wife named Minoo (Gopi Desai) and a seemingly obedient teenage student son named Farid (Akbar Kurtha).

The film begins with a satirically keyed scene in the home of a British police commissioner, whose daughter is engaged to Farid. The expressions of pained politeness on the faces of the commissioner and his wife foreshadow the son's rejection of the culturally degrading engagement, and his embrace of Muslim fundamentalism and its cultlike followers as a way of establishing his identity in an alien environment. But the treatment at first is comic rather than melodramatic.

Eventually, all hell breaks loose in the streets, and Parvez is caught in the melee, torn between the demands of his family and his puritanical co-religionists, and the deep love he comes to feel for an incredibly beautiful and sensitive prostitute named Bettina (Rachel Griffiths). Their relationship is compromised by the arrival of a pleasure-seeking German businessman named Schitz (Stellan Skarsgard) mispelled as "Shits" on the airport welcoming placard improvised by Parvez for one of the few easy laughs in the film.

Schitz compels Parvez to pimp for him in procuring the services of the willing Bettina, but this only fuels the passion between her and Parvez to the point that he is abandoned by his scandalized wife and son. He remains in the end as in the beginning, a man resolutely in the middle: tolerant, generous and unexpectedly romantic. Mr. Puri, Ms. Griffiths and Mr. Skarsgard charismatically transcend a strange slackness in the motivational construction of the film to make My Son the Fanatic an engaging entertainment.

Your Plot's Breaking Up

Bruce Wagner's I'm Losing You , from Mr. Wagner's novel and screenplay, is about as morbid a movie as you are likely to see this year in any language, much less the wittily ceremonial Los Angeles dialect of death fashioned by a novelist filmmaker with genuine talent, with a cast of admirably serious non-box-office actors willing to dive into the H.I.V.-V.I.P. pit of contemporary Hollywood.

I was particularly impressed by Frank Langella's relaxed charm as a cancer-ridden patriarch, and Elizabeth Perkins as a devastatingly ironic casualty of H.I.V. Andrew McCarthy is less effective in what I kept thinking of as the Eric Stoltz part, while Buck Henry, Amanda Donohoe, Rosanna Arquette, Salome Jens, Gina Gershon and Laraine Newman play all the other major parts with splendid efficiency and iconic evocativeness. The movie is less depressing than any detailed synopsis of the plot would suggest, and I recommend Mr. Wagner's film to any moviegoer truly looking for something different.

Still, Mr. Wagner might ponder the fact that Thanatos can be worshipped on the printed page more painlessly than on the screen. It may seem more realistic or more adult to confront the sleeping monsters of the human condition head-on, particularly in the AIDS-saturated environment Mr. Wagner is exploring in his highly praised novel and newly released film. Unfortunately, he has neglected to provide an adequate dramatic framework for the catastrophes and impending catastrophes he visits upon his characters. But at least he has provided more than a few moments of richly earned gallows humor and graveyard gallantry. There is also an interesting anti-assimilationist subtext in the preoccupation with ancient Jewish cleaning-of-the-dead rituals.

But as with My Son the Fanatic , I was not confident that I fully understood what was morally and culturally afoot in I'm Losing You , a clever play on the words used increasingly by cell-phone users in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, one sees so many movies in this business, that one comes to value lucidity over ambiguity and, even more, clarity over obfuscation.

There are so many ways the tenuous conceit of The Truman Show could have gone wrong and run out of satiric steam. But it is a pleasure to report that it is a good, intelligent, insightful movie instead, with many of the romantic and redemptive virtues of last year's unappreciated Gattaca , which was written and directed by the New Zealand-born Mr. Niccol, also the screenwriter for The Truman Show . Both Gattaca and The Truman Show have the same fix on the future as a time of efficient repression without cartoonish brutality. Ethan Hawke's hero in Gattaca seeks to escape the trap of a universally deterministic DNA; Mr. Carrey's hero in The Truman Show must first discover that the world he inhabits is an artificially contrived cosmos enclosed in a gigantic plastic bubble, and then break free into the uncertain world beyond the studio set's boundaries.

The wonderland wizards of the Hollywood bottom line have expressed their horror at Mr. Carrey's decision to jeopardize his superstar status by not simply mugging his way through another simple-minded farce with the promise of a big box-office first weekend, the more moronic and demented the better. I hope The Truman Show will prove them wrong with Mr. Carrey's commercially dangerous mixture of moods and feelings, and his choices of understatement and underreaction at the most harrowing moments.

The movie was actually shot in the town of Seaside, Fla., a so-called "planned community" with rigorously enforced zoning and building codes designed to preserve a neo-Victorian look in the architecture, with only slight variations in colors and outdoor appearances. One would think that the citizens of Seaside might have been suspicious because of the tendency in Hollywood to yokelize everyone but those who live either in Malibu or Manhattan. Were they ever aware that Seaside was being joked up as Seahaven, a hellishly sunny demi-paradise in the Walt Disney Company mold that impels its hero to break out at any cost?

Still, we must resist the temptation to look at The Truman Show primarily as a cautionary fable against the power of television and its attendant surveillance technology to pry into every nook and cranny of our supposedly private lives. That would be too easy a way to slide into the facile decline-and-fall rhetoric that shapes so much of our premillennial discourse. What makes The Truman Show more subtle and more interesting than all that is its paranoid suggestion that we can never be sure of the sincerity and veracity of even those nearest and dearest to us.

Significantly, Mr. Weir and Mr. Niccol are much more successful in this context with Truman's supposed best friend Marlon, played beautifully by Noah Emmerich, than with Truman's ostensibly loving wife Meryl, played by Laura Linney much too broadly and non-seductively. Indeed, the gaping hole in the plot involves Truman's marital relationship, and the unresolved uncertainty about what it actually entails in the television show within the movie.

Christof, the demonized creator of The Truman Show , is rendered by Ed Harris in a masterfully sinister beret that evokes a monomaniacal media deity, or even a deranged archfiend auteur. Christof has been thwarted thus far only by the inability of Truman and Meryl to produce a child that will be seen around the world at the moment of its birth. But Truman and Meryl are never seen engaged in mild foreplay, much less the hard-core stuff from which babies are usually made. And no wonder. Truman's first and only love was a reality freak in the acting ranks playing a character named Lauren (her real name, she tells Truman, is Sylvia), and interpreted with sharp-eyed tenacity and tough-love idealism by Natascha McElhone. Lauren/Sylvia was removed from the cast by order of the

omnipotent Christof, and with a covering line in the script to the effect that her family had taken her to Fiji, which becomes Truman's mantra for the far-off places of his dreams.

As the moment of decision approaches, the movie doesn't lapse into cheap melodrama, but ascends, like Gattaca , to a state of lyrical individualism and spiritual nobility. Mr. Harris will probably be nominated for an Oscar for his absurdist Christof, and Mr. Carrey and Mr. Emmerich deserve one even more, but they may be too good for the madding crowd.

The Accidental Murderers

Erik Skjoldbjaerg's Insomnia , from a screenplay by Nikolaj Frobenius and Mr. Skjoldbjaerg, manifests itself as that oddity of oddities, a film noir policier shot in northern Norway's "land of the midnight sun," where the dark side of human nature is forced out of the shadows into the blazing sunlight of a freakish fact of the solar system. The story is seen through the bleary eyes of criminal investigator Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgard), who, with his lighthearted partner Erik Vik (Sverre Anker Ousdal), has been sent from the south to help the local police solve what seems to be the fiendish murder of a young woman. There turn out to be only two suspects, one of whom, novelist Jon Holt (Bjorn Floberg), makes his guilt known to Jonas very early in the investigation. Unfortunately for Jonas, Holt has witnessed the detective's accidental killing of his partner Vik in the course of a chase through the fog for Holt himself. Surprisingly, Jonas succumbs to Holt's blackmail and tries to cover up his own malfeasance by framing the murdered woman's former boyfriend.

We are a long way from Inspector Morse and Commander Adam Dalgliesh on Masterpiece Theater 's "Mystery!" series. Jonas is a detective out of Franz Kafka and Patricia Highsmith, with more guilt and shame on his shoulders than the criminals he pursues. To make matters worse, he suffers from an insomnia made more intense by the infernally endless sunlight to which he is subjected. Jonas suffers from nightmares in his sleep and from hallucinations in his half-waking hours. He is not above a little lecherous fondling of sullenly susceptible teenagers, though he is humiliatingly rebuffed at every turn. Just when he is about to be unmasked by local police detective Hilde Hagen (Gisken Armand), matters work themselves out with Holt's accidental drowning.

Mr. Skarsgard has been all over the place as an international multilingual actor in The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Breaking the Waves (1996) and Good Will Hunting (1997). Yet Insomnia probably comes closer than anything else to serving as a pure vehicle for his somber talents. His Jonas is one of the most tortured heroes, or antiheroes, if you prefer, you are ever likely to see on the screen. He keeps remembering an unfinished comic anecdote his slain partner was telling him shortly before the terrible accident that took his life. Mr. Skarsgard drives all his character's guilt so far beneath his already anguished surface that you are forced to withhold any easy sympathy you might have been tempted to give him. His ironies, like his feelings, are glacial, and are not to be questioned or explained.

Insomnia is ultimately less a mystery of detection than a meditation on guilt, crime and punishment in a senseless world. Mr. Skarsgard's skill as an actor enables us to perceive his punishment as a form of spiritual solitude.

A French Bedroom Farce For the 90's

Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors has been hanging around for the past month as the meteor and monster movies line up at the multiplexes around town, oozing hype as they engage in a seemingly endless demolition derby. By welcome contrast, Sliding Doors is a surprisingly clever demonstration of the way a very tired type of French bedroom farce can be rejuvenated simply by making the doors slide rather than slam, and by disguising the ridiculous predictability of the plot by splitting it into two symmetrical stories out of sync by only the few seconds it takes for Gwyneth Paltrow's Helen either to get past the sliding doors into her underground train, or to miss the train.

In the first story, Helen allows herself to be picked up by James (John Hannah), a Scotsman who is destined to be the love of her life, even though, at the moment, she is living with the feckless Gerry (John Lynch), who is supposed to be working at home on a novel while she works for an advertising agency. Helen has just been fired from her job, is going home earlier than usual and is thus in a position to catch Gerry in flagrante delicto with an old flame named Lydia (Jeanne Tripplehorn). In the second one, Helen just misses getting past the sliding doors and misses catching Gerry in the sack with Lydia.

How the two Helens manage to catch up with each other is less important than the opportunity it gives Mr. Lynch's Gerry to engage in very funny Feydeau-esque routines that stamp him as a gutless wonder and a born loser. Even Ms. Paltrow's cutesy artificiality as an actress works to make Sliding Doors like Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest , an occasion where, in Louis Kronenberger's words, "Everything counts, and nothing matters."