Fearless Femmes

You've never seen a Holocaust drama like the long-lost "The Last Stage," now on DVD.

Seasonal affective disorder victims beware: after “The Last Stage,” enjoying Johan Renck’s new indie “Downloading Nancy” (2008) might push you toward the Seconals and bourbon. Shot and acted with ferocious morbidity, the movie is a toe tag experience, with a narrative shaped as a slow striptease revealing why and how the certain desperate woman of the title (Maria Bello) has come to crave pain and death.

The film is fragmented in the late-Arriaga style (à la “Babel,” “The Burning Plain,” etc.), but soon we get the gist: Nancy is married to selfish, insensitive suburban schmo Rufus Sewell, and her intense and viciously masochistic impulses, born out of childhood abuse, start bubbling up under the surface. She finds an outlet online in the form of lizard-eyed sadist Jason Patric, who runs some kind of underground video operation, and eventually (or, in the shuffle, right away) leaves her home for a rendezvous, for purposes we learn very gradually. Back at home, Sewell’s exasperated jerk doesn’t have a clue as to why his life fell apart.

While the description might make “Downloading Nancy” sound generic, it’s not — the amount of open hostility and pain frontloaded into the film immediately sets off our rubbernecking instincts, and it’s impossible to look away, except when the sexual violence begins (cigarettes, mousetraps, etc.). This is a film about sex and death that’s not afraid of blood, or of ambivalence. Renck’s style is doggedly serious and brooding, and it sometimes veers toward pretension.

But the glue is Bello herself, an actress just now being recognized as the cherry bomb she is, at an age (40s) when all actresses starve for roles. Her Nancy is a fearsome beast, a knot of twisted sexual yens and suicide-bomber-like disregard for self that is, in the end, impenetrable. No one does angry conviction quite like Bello, whose bullet-line intelligence is key to Nancy’s situation, as she is both the victim and the knowing arbiter of her destruction. When you’re in her company, you know that nothing is safe and any bad thing can happen.

“The Last Stage” (Facets) and “Downloading Nancy” (Strand Releasing) are now available on DVD.

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