At nearly two-and-a-half hours, this sometimes feels as if it's trying to convey the central character's increasing instability by having her drive you crazy, but it's still a powerful story of ordinary, everyday insanity with a pair of incredibly convincing central performances.
Rowlands, a bubbly but unstable housewife, slowly cracks up to the puzzlement of her decent, working-class husband (Falk), her initially delightful personality congealing as she seems possessed by the spirit (and voice) of Popeye while her humour drains away and she begins to make appalling, random, often devastating, verbal attacks on anyone in sight.
