How sad is this?

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

It's hard to believe that this script came from one of England's finest playwrights. The dialogue is so monosyllabic and kindergartenish that it's also hard to believe that the characters are members of academia. The actors go through their parts like zombies--you can drive a truck through the lines. Nobody seems to react to anyone else or anything else. the sexual attraction for the Austrian student can be explained only by the phrase zombie meets zombie. She opens her mouth and the result is embarrassment. She has the facial expressions of a patient shot full of novacaine and the body language of the Venus de Milo. The direction is pretentious, lackluster and uninspired. Like so many "art" films, the entire movie is overshot and overly long and, quite frankly, not only do I wonder why it was ever made but why most of those who have posted here seem to regard it as the greatest thing since buckwheat.

The film begins with an accident outside Dirk Bogarde's home. When he investigates, he finds a car had crashed. The man (Michael York) was dead and the young lady (Jacqueline Sassard) unconscious. Then, the film switches--to well before the accident occurred. Bogarde plays a middle-age professor at one of Oxford's colleges. He has a wife and two kids--and one more on the way. However, it becomes apparent that he feels like he's missing something. And, when he sees two young lovers together who he tutors, he begins thinking about having an affair with the young lady. But, as she's already taken, he has a rather meaningless one-night stand with another woman. Still, he can't get his mind off this young Austrian student--and it's sure to destroy his marriage if he cannot stay focused.I have reviewed a ton of movies--many of which might be considered artsy or foreign language films. So, I do have a rather high tolerance for the non-traditional or slow movies. However, I STILL had a hard time with "Accident", as I found it incredibly ponderous--way too slow for its own good. In other words, it takes a good story idea and bogs it down because it moves too slowly, the acting is way too subdued (almost zombie--like) and the emotion is totally lacking. It also doesn't help that they deliberately gave the film the absolute minimum of dialog. Sure, all this heightens the sense of depression and longing the characters feel--but it also makes a painfully drab and unappealing film that I would not recommend to friends--unless they had insomnia.

If "anyone with a soul can't fail to appreciate this picture", then I can state categorically that I have no soul.It's rarely that I'm tempted to walk out of a picture during performance, but in this case I was. (I noticed that a fellow member of the audience actually did exit part-way through; the woman next to me kept checking the time on her mobile phone, to which I really couldn't complain, as I had already done the same on my wristwatch...) My rating above is as high as it is solely on the grounds of "Accident"'s critical acclaim -- surely it must be doing something right that I simply can't see..? I wasn't expecting a feel-good film from what little I'd heard about it, but I did expect something with emotional impact: a searing tragedy or a bitterly ironic script. The last thing I expected was tedium coupled with confusion, but that was what I got. Characters whom I alternately disliked and was left cold by, undertaking activities which I found distasteful on those occasions that I could actually understand them. Everybody hates everyone else (as the programme notes announced with an air of approval when I read them later). Everything happens at great and inconsequential length. The one famous line, "You're standing on his face!", occurs within a few minutes of the start.The montage of unexplained sounds over the opening credits is more or less symptomatic of the whole film in its presumed intent to be deeply significant (and its ultimate result of confusion and alienation) -- we hear a typewriter, although none is ever seen in the house shown, an apparently irrelevant aeroplane, engine noises which with hindsight presumably belong to the road later revealed to be located just behind the camera, and what sounds for all the world like a passing steam train. The latter sound continues, inexplicably, throughout Dirk Bogarde's walk along the roadside towards the crash, waxing and waning as he confronts the injured girl.By the end of the film, I found that I simply didn't care who did what to whom -- I had lost the ability to be shocked or even interested, due to the total lack of sympathetic characters -- I just wanted them to get on with it. It got to the stage where I was actively pretending that I was watching a silent film and trying to see if it made any more sense that way, if one watched the body language and totally ignored the dialogue: perhaps this was Pinter's intent.I'm afraid I would actively pay not to have to watch this film again. I felt particularly short-changed, I suppose, due to having been promised a masterpiece -- no doubt that will teach me my lesson for daring to watch a picture made after 1960 :-)

Having just viewed The Victim, Night Porter, and The Servant -all Dirk Bogarde films, I found the accident interesting but somewhat boring. Yes, the atmosphere is thick with uncomfortable people in uncomfortable situations. The dialogue is sparce. People stare. We hear thoughts. . . a whole sequence of Stephen and a former girlfriend meeting in a restaurant with very little if any dialog. And a sign in the restaurant "Eat here and keep your wife at home as a pet." Lovely. Apparently the restaurant was known for late night trysts.The three men, Stephen, Charley, and William have the hots for Anna, although I can't imagine why. She is as warm as a piece of stone, and her acting is minimal. I wasn't prepared for the final accident. Whose? I was reminded of some of the French and Italian films of the 1960 -L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse.