Interiors Poster

Interiors (1978)

Drama  
Rayting:   7.5/10 18.4K votes
Country: USA
Language: English
Release date: 7 December 1978

Three sisters find their lives spinning out of control in the wake of their parents' sudden, unexpected divorce.

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User Reviews

Chimale1025 5 May 2004

This is one of those films that when you recommend, you should also warn.It is a very mature work about a very sick and warped family. It is also a very beautifully realized piece of filmmaking. The only real complaint I have about it is that it wasn't recorded in stereo or surround. Since Woody Allen is deaf in one ear, I guess he doesn't care. Thank God, he isn't color blind. Geraldine Page is absolutely devastating as the suffocating wife as she creates the woman of limited imagination and total self importance who strangles the joy of living out of her immediate family. She is a pathetic villain whose sick arrogance is the bane of every one she touches with her sterile iciness. This is a cautionary tale about what mental illness can do if left unchecked and untreated. It is also Woody Allen doing Bergman like Stanley Donen doing Hitchcock in Charade, not a lesser film than Bergman, just an American take on the same kind of situation. Bergman is not as good as Bergman. Every Good filmmaker gets elevated to such outrageous levels of hype in this disturbingly stupid era of 100 best lists that a lot of very good movies get ignored and filmmakers of previous eras are treated like trash, so that a self promoting cretin like Tarantino whose films are all style and absolutely zero substance can be lionized by a bunch of film school educated idiotic critics. This is not a must see, but it is an important film for the film scholar. As much as Enchanted April is life affirming, this one is life threatening. Talked to death has never been done better.

preppy-3 26 May 2006

Fmovies: Allen's first really serious film plays like an Bergman film. It's a dead serious study of a very dysfunctional family.

The father (E.G. Marshall) wants a trial separation from his wife (Geraldine Page). This totally destroys her life but her grown children try to help. One daughter (Diane Keaton) keeps giving her false hope that her husband will return. Meanwhile she has issues with her husband (Richard Jordan)--he finds her very condescending about his writing and she reacts with anger. Another daughter (Mary Beth Hurt) tries to get her mother to face reality. She has no direction in life herself and her husband (Sam Waterston) wants a child. A third daughter (Kristin Griffith) barely figures in this.

Somber, bleak, quiet and stark. Full of angry, unsatisfied people--the only humor is provided by Maureen Stapleton who shows up late in the movie. This film contains many emotionally vicious moments. It's unpleasant sometimes but you can't stop watching. The dialogue is great--full of fascinating insights into what the characters are feeling. Occasionally the actors sound like they're giving speeches instead of talking but that's rare. Marshall seems ill at ease in his role but everyone else is dead on target. Especially good are Page who is frightening--you can see her trying not to feel and control everything at the same time. Keaton is just superb--one of her best ever dramatic performances. A highlight is the last sequence between Hurt and Page.

The film sometimes seems over-directed--everything is so precise and ordered but it fits the tone of the movie. Also the ending is a little too pat and Griffith is given nothing to do--I often wonder what she was doing in this.

Still this is an exceptional drama. It's not for everyone--it may be too bleak for most people but I think it's Allen's best drama. A 10 all the way.

BitterJim 18 November 2014

I'm a big fan of Woody Allen, and I just watched this movie for the first time. I can totally understand why many people hate it, or do not like it. It is depressing, and there's no real "finish" or arc for the characters.

That being said, the one thing that stood out for me that nobody has mentioned, is that even Woody Allen didn't like the characters. I think that was his point. As some have pointed out, the characters are pretentious, self absorbed upper middle class yuppies with no real problems. I think what Woody Allen was doing, as was the case in Manhattan, was giving us a glimpse into that sort of liberal elitist upper crest society, where these characters in particular are pseudo-intellectuals and wannabe artists, who create their own problems that really don't mean anything.

This would explain the introduction of Pearl, the fathers new fiancé. Pearl is great. Amidst all the self absorbed, elitist syrup the characters espouse relentlessly, Pearl emerges as almost a down to earth, working class gal.

The family goes out to a play with their father and Pearl, and later while eating dinner, they are discussing this play. The daughters and their yuppy husbands are over analyzing the play to literally a puke inducing pretentiousness...and Pearl just chimes in "One character was a squealer, the other wasn't. I liked the character who wasn't a squealer. Thats all there is to it!" They try to argue with her with more pretentious drivel, and Pearl simply states again "The message I got was "dont Squeal." Later, Pearl is dancing to dixieland music with everybody, and knocks over a vase on accident, and the one daughter calls her an animal. Towards the end of the movie, Pearl ends up saving the daughters life with CPR after she nearly drowns. She seems almost ungrateful. Its as if this fmaily is so elitist, they look down on Pearl as some sort of "inferior".

Pearl is a down to earth, normal, lovable older woman with some spunk, which is why the father fell in love with her. Throughout the movie, we see how dominating and obnoxious their mother is. She is pretty much the reason the family is dysfunctional, with her delusional, relentless whining, and quiet yet aggressive behavior. On top of that, she was a successful interior designer, and her 3 daughters are all "artsy" intellectuals...and you can see why a character like the father is just overwhelmed with them all, and falls in love with a very grounded, relatively simple woman, Pearl.

I think it was Woodys purpose to make you feel burdened or overwhelmed by the characters, the mother...hell, almost feel completely alienated, only to suddenly find yourself relating to Pearl when she arrives.

Another scene that kind of highlights the pretentiousness of the characters, one of the girls husbands is speaking into a tape recorder about marxism and communism, hinting that he is a supporter of such ideology. Which, again, is woody making a small point. Because here you have this wealthy, yuppy guy, embracing the concept of marxism.

For anyone who grew up or lived around New York in the 60's and 70's, that was always one of those ironies...wealthy yuppy types preaching about marxism and communism. Its sort of a hypocrisy Woody Allen often points out in many of his movies.

To summarize, this was a serious movie that essentially criticizes the upper class liberal crowd, as Woody has done in many of his movies. In Manhattan, Woody narrate

moonspinner55 18 March 2006

Interiors fmovies. The three adult daughters of a quiet attorney and an imperious matriarch are alternately offended and benumbed by their parents' divorce and their father's "hasty" decision to remarry (leaving mama to fend for herself, probably something she needs but does not enjoy--there's no one to boss around). Bergmanesque drama from writer-director Woody Allen, who does not appear or even feel present (Pauline Kael of the New Yorker claims his neuroses have been transposed to the mother-character, but I never felt like I was watching something created by Woody Allen). All the actors are quite fine playing characters who are high-strung, uptight, woebegone (yet oddly, never intentionally comical), yet the flatness of the dialogue and the listlessness of Mary Beth Hurt's frequent narration may strain some viewers' patience. Some of the wordy sequences tend to ramble, and what words! Allen has a fixation with non-textbook terms for multiple abnormal psychoses; and no matter how educated Hurt's character is supposed to be, I had trouble swallowing some of the high-brow talk in her third-act put-down of Geraldine Page. The movie--seriously well-scrubbed, sterile and somber--has many conflicts and personality quirks which feel real and intricate, and Page's high society dementia is riveting (alternately, Maureen Stapleton's gaudy low-class is also superb). The three sisters remain enigmas that confound and confuse (each other and the viewer) but Diane Keaton's gritty reserve as the eldest daughter is the one I gravitated towards. Not a masterpiece (as some critics claimed), but certainly not a dud. It's Woody's art-house gambol, a dark one, and it leaves behind a fascinating imprint. *** from ****

member3285 11 February 2004

I do not praise films simply because other people or critics love it; I also don't praise films simply because other people or critics hate it. I really do think for myself, so you can take it as an assured commendation when I say that this is one of the best melodramas ever put on film. I'm not a pseudo-intellectual; I don't think Woody Allen is perfect, and I'm not out to impress anyone with my taste. I simply loved the movie - the script, the visuals, the acting... all touched me deeply and moved me nearly to tears, which happens to me only about once for every hundred movies I see. People have complained that the movie is morbid, self-indulgent, that the characters are shallow; but I think that all three of these elements actually contribute to the film. Morbidity is a part of life, and this film is not an attempt to cover up the sad truths of existence with cheap laughs or explosions; self-indulgence does not preclude quality, and many of the best films ever made have been self-indulgent. And the characters exhibit both shallowness and depth, just like real people... I think that mostly people who criticize this film either don't have the attention span to relate to a slower movie, or they lack a certain empathy with those who suffer, or they simply expect every Allen film to be a comedy. If you can get past those hangups, though, you might just find that you love this movie too.

kyle_furr 9 February 2004

John Waters said that if this film was made under a Swedish pseudonym, they would of called it a masterpiece. Woody Allen was only able to get a film like this made after he won all those Oscars for Annie Hall. Everyone is great in here and it's nice that there's no soundtrack. This is one of Woody Allen's best films.

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