A Kiss Before Dying
First screened in 1991 or 1992 / Most recently screened and reviewed in July 2025
Director: James Dearden. Cast: Matt Dillon, Sean Young, Max von Sydow, James Russo, Martha Gehman, Diane Ladd, Joie Lee, Ben Browder, Jim Fyfe, Adam Horovitz. Screenplay: James Dearden (based on the novel by Ira Levin). Twitter Capsule:
Unremittingly awful. You can faintly discern worthy intents, but it's stilted from script to acting to style.
VOR:①
Despite occasionally (and gracelessly) flaunting an interest in cinema history and historical styles, this film is fated to leave no mark at all.
For a movie full of mirrors and blurry identities, here's another pair: the Kiss Before Dying remake is either 1) a purposeful pastiche of 50s-mystery and 90s-thriller elements so discombobulated in execution that it comes off as sub-competent, or 2) such a hasty, under-budgeted, ill-finessed 90s thriller that it often comes across unintentionally as an homage to archaic 50s techniques. You decide, though the best decision is just to skip it, with its plodding montage, pre-realist acting, dire rear-projection, and vainglorious Vertigo snippets.
The one star is an acknowledgment of just three things: Howard Shore's score, sawing and swooping away as if it's for a much more exciting and emotionally rich movie; a panicked chase between the two key antagonists that, until its final beat, feels a lot more evocative than usual of the fierce but flailing way that real people might duke it out in a domestic battle to the death; and the devilish motive and logic of murder, lately unveiled though not exactly unguessable, and a design so tight by Ira Levin that even a badly botched adaptation can't totally erode it.
Otherwise, yikes. Yikes! Not tense thriller yikes, total fiasco yikes. Sean Young (in)famously won the Razzies for lead and supporting actress in the dual role of twin sisters, and as crappy as that organization is, they sure had a point here. Max von Sydow goes swiftly over the top in a functional role but still somehow makes it easy to forget he was ever there—a neat trick, and a good lesson to Diane Ladd, who honorably attempts a real Actors Studio character portrait amid a hostile climate and just looks stiff and misguidedly serious. Matt Dillon, a handsome man who has rarely allowed himself to lean into sexiness, demonstrates again (as in Wild Things) just how much his heart is not in that project. He's way more interested in psychopathy than in the erotic appeal by which his character insinuates himself with victims, but he's not being directed well enough to make that convincing. At least you can see he's trying, and he wakes up a little in his one big scene with von Sydow, as anyone should. Everyone else in the cast is surely also trying, but it's harder to award them even partial credit.
And in any case, A Kiss Before Dying is just one of those movies where you can practically hear in the sound mix the crew's and the cast members' miserable letters home, the angry calls to the same agents who were previously implored to get their clients involved, and the sighs of writer-director James Dearden as his earnestly wrought but perhaps poorly communicated and 100% poorly executed plans came to naught, possibly as early as the third day of filming. It's striking, and apt, that even when Criterion or Karina or whoever occasionally give a big glow-up to the 90s psychosexual thriller canon, even they don't pretend to recuperate this one. I love Fatal Attractionso much that I wanted to love the scripter's rare foray in the director's chair. But the movie's first dramatic action is also its perfect emblem: a fatal fall from a very high height. Grade:D–
