The Three Faces of Eve (1957)

This film starts out with a man giving a grave disclaimer, stating that the events in this film are based purely on true events. That most of the dialogue is in fact taken from the actual patient records of the so-called Eve White herself. The film is based on a real life account of a doctor's interactions with a patient who had multiple personality disorder.

We first meet Eve White in her psychiatrist's office. She explains that she suffers from blackouts and very bad headaches, and also that her husband seems to accuse her of things that she has no recollection of doing. It seems to be clear to the doctor that she has some sort of psychosis, but he's not exactly sure what... until during one therapy session she transforms into an entirely different personality before his eyes. He discovers that she has multiple personality disorder, and that she in fact is not the only person living inside her head. It eventually comes to light that three women reside within the body of Eve White. Eve White herself is a very timid, defeated housewife, and is completely unaware that she is sharing her body with another person calling herself Eve Black, who is the exact opposite of her. She's rambunctious and promiscuous and almost childish in her abject selfishness. She claims that she is not married to Eve White's husband and is not the mother of her child. She instead prefers to go out dancing at the local bar many a night. The final personality gives herself the name Jane, and we do not learn much about her when she is introduced. In fact, she knows very little of her own self. The psychiatrist works hard to understand how the personalities interact with each other, and tries to get them to coexist. He is also wildly curious about the event in Eve's past that may have caused this splitting on her personality and works very hard to discover it.

This is a pretty gripping film. Joanne Woodward does a great job of seamlessly switching between the different personalities, and performs each of them so believably well. Watching her work, I found that I did not even once wonder if she suit the role of the different personalities she was portraying because she performed them all so well. One could rightly believe that the performances were genuinely different characters, and she was able to transition from one character to another so quickly and smoothly also. There was no contrived 'transformation' from one personality to another, the transition took place largely in her head and she demonstrated that effectively.

Another interesting thing about film of this nature, in this era, is the fascination with mental disorders and the relation that disorder has to a past trauma. It's really fun watch the characters dig through the past to discover the cause of what ails them.

The characters and story went into just enough detail about the personal lives of the girls and displayed enough emotion each of them were feeling about their situation to create compelling hold on the viewer. Though I may not have liked all of the character types, I was genuinely interested in what was going to happen to them and how, or even if, the hopes and dreams they had about fulfilling each woman's own personal needs and desires would be fulfilled.

Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door (2007)

This is one of those traumatizing movies that you wish you had never seen because you can't get the images out of your head, but at the same time, couldn't tear your eyes away from the horror as it was happening. Warning, not for youth or the easily disturbed.

This majority of this film is told via a flashback of one summer a man named David had in his childhood. David lived in a normal, suburban neighbourhood in the 50's. He was an only child, but got along well with and spent a lot of time with the other boys in his neighbourhood, especially his next door neighbours, a group of boys living with their single mother, Ruth. David's life changed forever the summer that two girls moved into the house next door. Their parents were both killed in a car crash (the younger sister was crippled and required leg braces) and Ruth was their next of kin. The girl's name is Meg and David is taken with her from the moment he lays eyes on her.

David tries to get inconspicuously closer to Meg, but as he spends more time at his neighbour's house, he sees more and more tension between Meg and her Aunt Ruth. At first it's small things like making snide comments about her 'delicate womanhood' or implying that she's a slut. David can tell there is tension, but it just seems uncomfortably out of place, they're just words after all. Things change when one day David comes over and sees Meg's cousins tickling her and one of them touches her breast. The tickling was unwanted, but after the touch Meg shoved the boy to the floor, who then went to tell his mother. Here Ruth starts being physical, but not to Meg. She instead beats Meg's younger sister, who is crippled, as a punishment to Meg. Subtle but severe power struggles such as this continue between Ruth and Meg, Meg having no choice but to succumb to Ruth in order to save her sister. A few days later at an outing, Ruth's boys spot Meg speaking with a police officer who stops by the house to check up on the situation, and here is where it gets a bit uncomfortable. Ruth feels that for her own safety, she must now be much more severe with Meg, which means ordering that Meg be tied up in the basement, hanging from the ceiling. At first, she is just left there, not given enough food, bruises and rope-burns covering her body, but it of course escalates. David watches, horrified, while all of this is going on. He feels that he can't do anything to stop it, that no one would believe him if he were to tell, and yet he doesn't want to abandon Meg. At one point, when she's half destroyed, he sneaks down into the basement and releases her, but instead of running to her freedom, she is caught once again by trying to take her sister away with her. This is where the other half of her gets worked on. Will Meg ever escape? Will David be able to save her? Do you want to know badly enough to risk seeing these images that may never leave you... in the worst sense possible?

I have mixed feelings about this film. It was definitely well done, lets start with that. The acting, cinematography, storytelling; all good. The subject matter however, is really uncomfortable. Throughout the film, the neighbourhood boys are all portrayed as either having these mean tendencies, or not caring enough about another human being to go against the crowd. In fact, excluding David, the boys are all quite taken with the idea of having Meg tied up in the basement, and practically jump over each other to carry out their mother's twisted orders. The other kids from the neighbourhood are no better. There's one scene, the worst one, where a whole bunch of kids come and watch/ help carry out the atrocities done to Meg. Boys and girls come to watch. Ruth is also a really twisted person, which is revealed ever more so as the film progresses. We aren't given much of a back story on her, but it's almost as if she's dead inside and tries kill what light she can see in others. There is physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse in this film. Every so often, I look for psychologically disturbing films. It's something that just morbidly fascinates me, the idea of insanity, or the lengths someone will go to harm someone else, or the motivation behind such actions, or how someone could actually endure something like that. Well on that front this film delivers... too well.

The most disturbing thing about this film is that it's based on a true story. There was a real girl named Silvia Likens who endured some of the same atrocities as were displayed in the film, worse in fact. An American Crime, with Ellen Page, is another film dealing with this case and it retells the story in a way that is closer to the actual events. It is a little more tame in comparison with this, and maybe the go to film if you still want to hear the story without the potential psychological scarring.

If you're in that mood, I recommend this film, but if not... then you probably won't enjoy it, and that might be an understatement.