Past Midnight Review

Past Midnight
Ben Jordan has just been released from prison for the brutal knife murder of his pregnant wife, which he continues to deny. He becomes romantically involved with his social worker Laura, but when she gets up the duff his murderous insanity is triggered.

by Kim Newman |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1992

Running Time:

100 minutes

Certificate:

15

Original Title:

Past Midnight

A decent thriller with a pair of good lead performances from Natasha Richardson and Rutger Hauer.

He's a recently-released high IQ ex-con who still claims that he didn't brutally stab his pregnant wife all those years ago, she's his social worker, at first intrigued by the strange character and then gradually drawn into an affair that gets really scary when she gets pregnant, perhaps triggering the fruitcake's dormant psychosis.

It manages to tread an ambiguous line for about an hour, with Hauer creepily convincing as the perhaps-innocent man who may still be a psycho, but the climax, triggered by Clancy Brown losing his arm, only for it to turn up bearing a rose for Natasha, is standard ranting, raving and shotgunning stuff.

Watchable psycho thriller
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