Review of Death and the Maiden (1994) by Francisco F — 04 Aug 2008

I feel like I was tied up and bludgeoned with a JM Coetzee novel, rather than a slim volume by Dorfman. Still, at least we're no closer to Justice. The film's final scene is as ambivalent a judgment as one might get about the possibilities of mixing the state's conceptions of justice with those that make sense within private lives, private psychologies, and individual entanglements.

The film does well in communicating a certain horror accompanied by a certain vertigo-- the desparation of the need for justice, and the terrible realization of the countless ways in which it recedes from us, or from any assistance to the difficult encounters between subalterneity and the law.