loading loading...

Interiors Details

1978 Certificate 15
  • Rated:
  • 60
  • from 1257 members

After the tremendous success of ANNIE HALL, Woody Allen took a huge risk and turned serious with INTERIORS, his Bergmanesque masterpiece--a dark, intense look at a family suffocating itself in thoughts of failure and death. Geraldine Page is extraordinary as Eve, a troubled woman who cannot face reality. When Eve's husband, .. Read more

Starring Diane Keaton, Kristin Griffith, Mary Beth Hurt, Richard Jordan
Director Woody Allen
Genres Drama

loading loading...

Interiors

After the tremendous success of ANNIE HALL, Woody Allen took a huge risk and turned serious with INTERIORS, his Bergmanesque masterpiece--a dark, intense look at a family suffocating itself in thoughts of failure and death. Geraldine Page is extraordinary as Eve, a troubled woman who cannot face reality. When Eve's husband, Arthur (E.G. Marshall), announces that he's moving out of the house, their three daughters (Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Kristin Griffith) gather around the mother, attempting to help her through this crisis, but they have been raised with such coldness and aloofness that they are helpless.
The first movie that Allen wrote and directed but did not appear in, INTERIORS is about closed spaces, both physical and psychological. Most of the scenes feature the intense cast standing by windows, looking out at the world that is going on outside without them. The opening shot of Renata (Keaton) reaching out to the window, spreading her fingers, is mesmerizing. Gordon Willis's photography washes the film in shades of black, white, and gray--the only color comes from Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), Arthur's new lover, who is vibrant and impulsive, everything Eve's family is not. The film also has no background music whatsoever; in fact, aside from one scene in which Pearl plays a jazz record, the only background sounds that can be heard are the quiet call of the ocean and the sisters' careful breathing. Slow-paced, bleak, and marvelously insightful, INTERIORS is a poignant film that should not be missed.

Starring Diane Keaton, Kristin Griffith, Mary Beth Hurt, Richard Jordan, E.G. Marshall, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Sam Waterston
Director Woody Allen
Studio MGM ENTERTAINMENT
Run time DVD: 1 hr 28 mins
Certificate Certificate 15
Genres Drama
Language DVD: English
Dubbed French, German, Italian, Spanish
Hearing-impaired English
Subtitles DVD: Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
Released DVD: 19 Aug 2002
Production year: 1978
Format DVD
  • Critics' reviews (2) of Interiors

    View all
  • 3 stars out of 5

    Coming between Woody Allen's great comic masterpieces Annie Hall and Manhattan, this intense drama baffled fans and divided critics on its original release. The influence of Ingmar Bergman is unmistakeable, but there are also echoes of Chekhov and Eugene O'Neill in this story of a family thrown into turmoil. Allen's stylish compositions and his astute handling of the cast are impressive, but the script lacks weight and some of the more searching scenes topple over into melodrama. Oscar-nominated Geraldine Page dominates the proceedings as the domineering, mentally disturbed mother, though EG Marshall and Maureen Stapleton also register in unassuming support.

    • Radio Times
  • Interiors must rank as one of the most spectacular changes of direction for an American artist since Clint Eastwood... read more on Time Out

    • Time Out
  • Most helpful member's review of Interiors

    View all
  • 13 out of 14 people found this review helpful

    Rated - 3 stars

    Interiors (1978)

    Woody Allen's films can be neatly divided into two types: the funny ones, and the not-funny ones. This film is not funny (there is a joke, about halfway through, involving an art gallery in the lobby of a casino, but that's it). Three sisters, each with their own problems, are devastated when their elderly father decides to separate from their mother. Their lives begin to unravel in slow, painful fashion. No, there are no inflatable vegetables in this Woody Allen film.

    However, it is a striking, powerful film that looks beautiful and is crafted with care and attention. The cinematography, all washed out colours, half-light and shadows, perfectly matches the despair and confusion of the characters; they are emotionally drained, as the sets are, too.

    However, there's a knowingness about this film - about cinema, about Bergman, about arthouse films - that never lets you just sit back and enjoy it. It's often self-conscious where it should be natural.

    Also, Allen's characters are the usual suspects - white, affluent, middle class intellectuals suffering existential angst as a result of an inability to express themselves. We identify with Allen in the comedic roles - as loser, chancer, clown - but, here, there's no-one to sympathise with. Even the much-hated girlfriend of the father (hated, just because she's not a true replacement for the mother) becomes the butt of the film's one and only joke.

    That said, the stand-out scene, where the mother prepares her living room with masking tape so that she can gas herself, shows a director blessed with true brilliance.

    This film is worth seeing once. But watch Deconstructing Harry (1997) straight after, just to realise that Allen can do funny and art-house at the same time.

      • Simon Cockle from Hitchin, England
  • Most recent members' review of Interiors

    View all
  • 5 out of 5 people found this review helpful

    Rated - 3 stars [Highly rated reviewer]

    Woody plays Ingmar

    Yes, this is a very serious Woody Allen at the feet of his master Ingmar Bergman. You can spend some time spotting reverential shots such as the hand at the window from 'Persona'. So we have a very serious film of family dysfunction and mis-communication leading to mental illness and suicide. Depending on your taste it can be watched although most of us will find it rather dry fare out of the context of Swedish society. I have never met Americans who behave like the characters in this movie do; they just don't ring true. And yet... the film has been assembled with such care that it seems almost timeless as if caught out of its context of 1980 United States. It may be that this film will last in the way that most Hollywood fare will not. Try it and see what you think.

      • Zamy from London
  • News and features

    View all
    Saraband

    Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007

    • 31 Jul 2007

    See the entire LOVEFiLM Bergman Collection here Checkmate. Death has finally taken the great Swedish master, Ingmar Bergman, as he always knew it must. No filmmaker wrestled longer and more painfully with the knowledge of his own mortality. His father was a severe Lutheran minister, and a figure who cast a long shadow over Bergman's films, including his premature swansong, Fanny and Alexander (1982), and perhaps his purest masterpiece, Winter Light (1962), a portrait of a pastor who has lost... Read more

  • More like this

    View all

Find cinemas


Rating breakdown

1,257 Member ratings
  • 100
103
  • 90
81
  • 80
177
  • 70
169
  • 60
241
  • 50
154
  • 40
116
  • 30
90
  • 20
86
  • 10
40

Buy from the LOVEFiLM shop


    • Interiors
    • DVD: £3.93
      Free Delivery
    • RRP £15.79 (you save: 75%)
    • After the tremendous success of ANNIE HALL, Woody Allen took a huge risk and turned serious with INTERIORS, his Bergmanesque masterpiece--a dark, intense look at a family suffocating itself in ...