This Tempting Madness review – watchable psychological suspense offers Mexican standoff of gaslighting
Pleasingly potboilerish tale of a woman trying to make sense of a traumatic fall that left her comatose slightly loses track of its toxic mind
Pleasingly potboilerish tale of a woman trying to make sense of a traumatic fall that left her comatose slightly loses track of its toxic mind games It is fair to say that spending your time doodling ouroboroses and picking open your surgical scar probably indicates you are not in a fantastic frame of mind. These are coping mechanisms for Mia (Simone Ashley) after she wakes up, at the start of this capable psychological thriller, from a coma resulting from falling several storeys of an airport building.
A safety net is luckily there to catch her – but she remains in mental freefall. Assaulted by stray fragments of memory, she is unable to say whether husband, Jake (Austin Stowell), who is currently in jail, was the one who pushed her over the parapet. As Mia tries to piece together shattered body and mind, her family, led by solicitous brother Ajay (Suraj Sharma), try to persuade her to cut Jake loose.
But she dithers, held back by guilt about how seriously she took his own unravelling, the spiralling paranoia that made him quit his job as a New York actuary and led them to start a new life in Los Angeles. When she finally visits him in jail, is Jake gaslighting her – intent on further manipulation – when he suggests that Ajay is gaslighting her for his own ends by pushing her to break up with him?
Or she gaslighting herself by giving him the benefit of the doubt in the first place? This is a Mexican standoff of gaslighting. Continue reading...
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