This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Beautifully written, directed and acted movie about a rich Los Angeles housewife going insane and blaming it on environmental toxins (sort of like the nuts nowadays who think their Teflon pans and plastic wrap are trying to kill them). Having found no doctor who can help her, Carol takes refuge in a creepy new-age cult in the desert - but instead of getting better she gets much worse.The story itself is pretty lame, but the extremely subtle and intelligent dialog, the absolutely perfect direction, editing and photography, and Julianne Moore's tight, brutal performance make it fascinating. I can understand why it won some obscure award as the best movie made during the 1990s, but it doesn't seem dated at all. I could easily believe it was released last year, and the fact that Moore has hardly aged at all in 20 years would back me up.

Carol White (Julianne Moore) is a wealthy housewife living an empty life in an affluent California suburb where the wrong colored couch being delivered is so very important. She's married to Greg (Xander Berkeley) with a stepson. She starts to suffer headaches. Her sickness gets more and more serious. People have differing opinions. The movie seems to indicate the everyday modern toxins. Her doctor (Steven Gilborn) sends her to a psychiatrist. An allergist finds that milk which she drinks constantly is a big trigger for her. She picks up a flyer from the community bulletin board and joins a group that blames it on modern chemicals. Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman) leads a chemical sensitive group living out in the middle of nowhere called Wrenwood.There is an overall haunting emptiness in the film. I do wonder what Todd Haynes is trying to say with this movie. It is Julianne Moore that keeps me intrigued. One thing that I didn't like is that Wrenwood has too many artificial things. It doesn't fit the concept. Also "Does that makes sense?" started to really annoyed me. I want the movie to do something but it somewhat peters out. It's more of a spiritual emptiness and a horror of the soul. I feel the same way about Wrenwood as the movie. Wrenwood is a bit cultish but it's not really hurting anyone. The movie is a bit odd but there's nothing obviously bad about it.

Seems like Todd Haynes is definitely a director with a certain skill for visualizing and really executing certain themes and ideas in ways that, if not entirely original, are surely very unique in their presentation. This film, like many have said, could really stand for a lot of different things (AIDS being the most obvious one) but it's definitely concerned with those types of ambiguities and metaphors that serve another type of resonance. The acting is fantastic, Moore actually giving one of the best performances from her entire career (shame it's such an underrated/underseen flick because I could see it having been a lot more popular). The film as a whole is very well developed.

Made with the kind of analytic intelligence that was the signature of Stanley Kubrick, but also with a tenderness that Kubrick seldom permitted, Safe is an intellectual horror film. Carol (Julianne Moore) is afflicted with environmental illness. It is a syndrome which many in the medical establishment refuse to recognize; those who do consider its sufferers, most of them women, to be the canaries of the 21st century. Keeping Carol at a distance - a fragile, almost paralysed figure in a chill, repressive environment - director Todd Haynes nevertheless locates the film within her subjectivity. Rather than alienating us from her, the measured, wide-angle, hyper-real mise-en-scene becomes an expression of the alienation she experiences. As her health deteriorates, we realize that everything in her environment - which is not very different from our own - is potentially lethal. The tension between identification and remove gives the film great gravity. Every frame seems charged with the push-pull of desire and loathing. Safe has the most conventional surface of all Haynes's films, but it makes the greatest demand on viewers. It would be wrong to look for the film's meaning in the words of the affable guru of Wrenwood. Nothing could be further from Haynes's position than the New Age prescriptions. 'Do you smell the fumes?' is the inscription on a flyer that catches Carol's eye. Safe suggests that we are all vulnerable to the fumes; the rest is up to us.