Safe

Ever participated in a culture, a movement, a group, and slowly begun to realize that not only do you disagree with some of its core principles, but you find yourself in a completely different plane of consciousness? A state where your mind becomes so resistant to the prevailing attitudes and mindsets that you begin to feel nauseated, mentally numb, with a constant nervous vibration coursing through every bone in your body? Then when the primitive instinct for survival kicks in and you reach out for help; anything to bring yourself back to “normal” – everyone around you makes it their mission to invalidate your emotions with scrutinizing confidence and absolutely no interest in understanding what lies beneath your distress... That’s how Safe really gets to you: manifesting like internal bleeding, feeling like you're suffering from diseases that don’t even have names Personally, this felt like the “queerest non-queer film” I’ve ever seen with its lens focused on a frenzied American problem-solving culture that reached its height in the 1980s. The first half exposes the consumerist anxiety of suburban Los Angeles: the stress of receiving the wrong-colored couch from the furniture store, the brutally inhumane Vogue crash diets, the pressure to choose hairstyles based not on personal taste but on a husband’s sexual preferences As Julianne Moore’s (exquisitely performed) character begins to feel overwhelmed by every aspect of her environment, down to the exhaust fumes of the never-ending LA traffic, she descends into a rabbit hole of self-help philosophies steeped in traditionalism replicating the original problem in its most raw form Safe doesn’t shatter you, but it does scratch at invisible scars in plain sight... or at least it did for me. It reminded me of a religious period in my early teenage years, born out of my attempts to cope with being queer. I consider myself rather lucky to now live in a world where real communities exist for people like me, despite the ongoing (and still severe) struggles. Thus, no matter how beautiful the mise-en-scène or seductive the illusion of 1980s life might appear, I absolutely see myself inhabiting Moore’s character’s skin in the same milieu agonized, isolated, and suffocating, marking this a piece of true queer slow-burn horror and a brilliant one at that