UNLIMITED STREAMING
WITH PRIME VIDEO
TRY 30-DAY TRIAL
Home > Drama >

Mary Reilly

Mary Reilly (1996)

February. 23,1996
|
5.8
|
R
| Drama Horror Thriller

A housemaid falls in love with Dr. Jekyll and his darkly mysterious counterpart, Mr. Hyde.

...

Watch Trailer

Cast

Similar titles

Reviews

GamerTab
1996/02/23

That was an excellent one.

More
GrimPrecise
1996/02/24

I'll tell you why so serious

More
Beanbioca
1996/02/25

As Good As It Gets

More
Maleeha Vincent
1996/02/26

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

More
Leofwine_draca
1996/02/27

This dull reworking of the Jekyll and Hyde story reposits the whole thing as a doomed Gothic romance, with mousy maid Julia Roberts working in the household of John Malkovich and gradually coming to realise that all isn't well with her employer. MARY REILLY suffers hugely from the random feminist slant on the story, which substitutes meek romance for the original story's full-blooded horror, rendering it into a weak and unwieldy production.I suspect that most viewers like myself will have a hard time with Roberts's attempts at an Irish accent. It's one of the worst accents to come from Hollywood, up there with Kevin Costner's attempts at an English accent in ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES; embarrassing, in fact. At least Malkovich has the good sense to not even attempt to do one, although his hammy overacting is off-putting in itself. The film does contain one surprise CGI effect, which looks appallingly dated to the modern viewer.As a film, MARY REILLY is slow, unfocused, and hampered by the viewer's knowledge of the story which means there are no surprises in store. The characters are poorly written and Reilly herself is unsympathetic - no Jane Eyre here, with hidden reserves of wit and courage, just somebody who doesn't even deserve the camera time. The one good thing about this film is that it features roles for British character actors like George Cole, Ciaran Hinds, Kathy Staff, and Michael Gambon. If I'm honest I would have preferred the film with Cole in the Jekyll role and Staff as the lead, they show up the Hollywood stars that much.

More
FlashCallahan
1996/02/28

Mary Reilly is a lonely servant in the home of Dr Henry Jekyll, devoted to her position and her master. Slowly, a gradual friendship between Mary and the doctor begins as well as a growing attraction. However, Mary's quiet presence is thrown upside down when she meets Henry Jekyll's assistant, the handsome but enigmatic Edward Hyde. Although initially repelled, Mary soon finds herself drawn towards his passionate nature. But Edward Hyde is not all he seems...There are two elements to the film that really take you away from everything and just ruin any good intentions that it may have had. Firstly, Julia Roberts' accent goes up and down more than her box office history, and it usually changes during a sentence, so you are not listening to what she is saying, you are listening to hear the change of accent.And secondly, and the biggest problem with the films coherence, is that the makers have made hardly any effort to change Malkovich when he is playing different characters. Hyde just has a limp, different hair and an attitude.Anybody, literally anybody, would know that it's the one and the same person.But us Brits do have the added bonus of seeing Arthur Daley and Nora Batty together at long last.Considering the body of work that the director has given us, this really is a dogs dinner of a film, and it's totally understandable as to why it made no money whatsoever, it's badly cays, badly written, and despite one really impressive shot featuring an upside down Hyde holding a human head, it has nothing visually stimulating either.It's as bad as the critics said it was back in 1996, it took me twenty years to finally see it, I'll never get that time back.Rubbish.

More
Dave from Ottawa
1996/02/29

Critics and audiences were bored with this remake of the Dr. Jeckyl tale when it first came out, but there is nonetheless a lot here to like. The viewpoint shift, allowing viewers to watch the familiar tale play out from the perspective of a serving woman in the Doctor's household, gives both a romantic edge to the picture and makes points about the place and role of women/servants in English society in Jeckyl's day. Roberts is very good as the lowest member of the household staff, trying to hold the Doctor himself and the household together while at the same time striving not to get above her station. And the grim, nearly black-and-white, dread-filled landscape of the picture is great to look at and memorable.

More
pogostiks
1996/03/01

OK, so this film was trashed by the critics... and I would bet a fortune that the average MTV generation movie-goer will practically fall asleep watching it - but I posit that their trouble with this film says more about them than it does about Frear's Gothic tale.There are weaknesses - above all the fact that everyone else (including Julia Roberts ) has an accent but Malkovitch refuses to even attempt one. What's an American accent doing in the middle of all this? Malkovitch also seems to be channeling his own performance in Frear's masterpiece, Dangerous Liaisons - but if you haven't seen that film you should love what he does in this one.But other than that, I found the slow pace to be totally gripping... The entire story is told from the viewpoint of Mary Reilly, and I have never seen Julia Roberts do a better job than here. She is wonderfully effective... it is worth watching this film only for her performance. But it is also worth watching because of the attention to period detail. You really get a feeling of what it must have been like to live in the 19th century. The manners, the utensils, the class differences...the psycho-sexual straight-jacket.I will not give any details about the film - I'll let those who watch it discover it for themselves. But I would like to say one thing about the pace. This is not an action film, it is not even a horror film in the traditional sense. It is mainly a story of discovery - dealing with the slow realization of hidden desires and uncontrolled motivations; as such it should not - nay, could not be done at a quicker pace. It's really too bad that fewer and fewer people today seem to be capable of watching something that is subtle and slow. The loss is theirs.

More