Safe Is the Best Movie You've Never Seen

Don't worry, I'd never heard of Safe either. A few months ago, a character from the movie, Lester, was the Peliplat profile picture of none other than Jenn the Editor. I asked her what movie her picture was from. When she told me, I played it off like I totally knew what she was talking about. It's an unwritten code that all cinephiles must be familiar with all movies that have ever existed. I quietly did my little Google search and discovered that Safe was a 1995 movie directed by Todd Haynes. I totally knew who that was... Okay, Safe was the first Haynes movie I ever watched. And I only watched it a couple days ago. Who do I hand my cinephile card over to?

The movie is a total trip to watch in 2025. It felt urgent. It felt new.

Julianne Moore stars as Carol White, a suburban housewife in Los Angeles. No kids, only a step-son with her husband, Greg, played by Xander Berkeley. At the beginning, her life feels very safe. Nothing ever happens. She orders a new couch; she goes to aerobics (it's set in the 80s); she drinks milk. However, there is something wrong with her.

One day, while driving behind one of those nasty trucks that blows dark smoke out of its exhaust, she starts to have a brutal coughing attack. It's so bad that she has to pull over before it subsides.

This leads to a string of events that results in her discovering that she has multiple chemical sensitivity (although they call it an environmental illness in the movie). MCS is a real but unrecognized diagnosis, one that relies on alternative medicines and pseudoscience.

The doctors can't find anything wrong with Carol. They suggest she see a psychoanalyst, but he's no help either. She only starts to feel better when she travels to New Mexico and joins a cult-like group that is devoted to helping people with environmental illnesses.

My favourite aspect of this movie is its cinematography. In the Los Angeles scenes, Haynes makes sure to visually explain what Carol is going through. There's this great scene where she is trying to explain to her friend what she's experiencing. They sit on a patio and eat fruit salad. Only, the patio is encased in one of those plastic shells that's meant to keep the heat in and the wind out. In the background, as Carol talks, is the incessant flow of L.A. traffic. The visual messaging is clear. As these two women try to eat healthy, they are surrounded by the toxic chemicals of humanity.

Despite the visual cues, I was still skeptical of Carol. To me, it seemed like her life's mundanity was causing her to get anxious and that was seeping out through this self-inflicted illness. There is an early scene with Carol and her girlfriends in the change room and they are talking about how one of their friends stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous because they felt that they were just replacing one addiction with another. To me, this described Carol's own search for purpose. In the friend's case, removing alcohol only opened a new void in their life and they filled it with the AA meetings. Carol's entire married life was a void, purposeless, for she had everything of consequence taken care of for her. Doing nothing can, indeed, lead to anxiety. Thus, this idea that she is being poisoned by chemicals gives her a purpose.

That's what I thought, but Haynes does so much to convince the audience that Carol's sickness is real. I don't doubt that her symptoms were real. I just believe that the human mind is very powerful and a person can make themselves sick in the quest to find something to live for.

Though Haynes makes Carol's sickness believable, he never seems to lose sight of my original thought, which was that Carol was creating this problem in her head. Trust me, I'm not trying to gaslight Carol, or you! The movie really plays on both sides of this argument, and doesn't give a definitive answer.

Wrenwood, the community where Carol goes to treat her environmental illness, is led by Peter Dunning, played by Peter Friedman. Whenever there's a cultish leader in a movie, I try my best to not be won over by their charm. It's like a little victory for myself, knowing that this cult would never win me over. Peter was the ultimate test. His look is immediately disarming — laidback with a big smile — a classic cult-leader archetype. Unfortunately, once Peter starts talking, he makes so much damn sense! Just look at this excerpt from his first speech:

"So we're feeling good; we're feeling warmth. We can look into each other's eyes and actually see rejuvenation and personal transformation happening. Why? Because we've left the judgemental behind. And with it, the shaming condition that kept us locked up in all the pain. But what I want to share with you tonight ... is an image to reflect on. An image of a world outside as positive and as free as the world we created here. Because when you look out on the world from a place of love and a place of forgiveness, what you are seeing outside is a reflection of what you feel within. Does that make sense?"

Okay, Peter, calm down, you're starting to win me over. I was flabbergasted because this speech was a reflection of the solutions I was finding for Carol within my own head. If she could just change her mindset, if she could find something else to focus on, if there was something else that gave her a sense of purpose, she wouldn't have these severe panic attacks.

Despite being the leader of this group that helps people cope with their environmental illness, Peter never loses sight of the psychology behind the sickness.

Late in the movie, Peter and some of the patients, if you can call them that, sit outside and have a little discussion. Peter asks them "why did you become sick?" The framing of this question, using why rather than how or when, says a lot, I think. It shows that Peter understands that a lot of this sickness is self-induced. A why implies a reason; not that it just happened or that they were born with it or even that some external factor caused this. It asks the sick person to look within as to the reason this sickness took hold of them. Carol, when asked this question, stays silent.

I'm still puzzling over this movie. I want to watch it again immediately. I keep trying to figure out when Carol is safe. Was the safety of her home in Los Angeles too mundane that she needed to subconsciously extract herself from the boring day-to-day life of a housewife? Did Wrenwood cure her or just give her an escape from her boring life? When Greg visits her, she can't even be near him without feeling nauseous. She tries to say it's his cologne, but then Greg says that he's not wearing any cologne. The implication is that the stress of her home life is what is keeping her unwell. She chooses to live with a bunch of strangers in a place that is not her home, and is this where she feels the most safe? What kind of life is it that you only feel safe in a completely sterilized, porcelain room? She's not a psychopath, but what subconscious triggers have caused her to remove herself from all the zest of life just so that she can breathe freely? Is it really so crazy to feel nauseated by the toxins that are all around us?

"For me, this was a gift. This whole thing was a gift, because everything got taken away from me. I mean, everything in the material world. And what was left was me."

Safe was nothing short of brilliant. It was the best movie I'd never seen. Thank you, Jenn, for the recommendation.

Safe1995