This served as both a tribute to star Natasha Richardson (whose life was tragically cut short last week at just 45 years old) and a belated one in honor of celebrated playwright Harold Pinter (here functioning as a screenwriter adapting somebody else's novel). Considered a psychological thriller – although, for the most part, it plays like a drama with erotic undertones – my decision to watch it on the day allotted to the former genre certainly paid off given the shocking twist ending. Being set in Venice, it also evoked strong memories of my memorable fortnight's stay there for the 2004 Film Festival. The film is arty and deliberately-paced, but intriguing (if hardly original) and exceedingly well-cast: Christopher Walken (often resorting to hamminess elsewhere, he is quietly chilling here),Richardson (beautiful, obviously talented and truly the image of her mother, Vanessa Redgrave) and Rupert Everett as the couple he ensnares (for kicks) and Helen Mirren as his seemingly reluctant – but eventually revealed to be just as ruthless – wife/accomplice. Director Schrader, of course, had started off as a writer himself and he wisely leaves the actors (and, by extension, the script) to their own devices. To get back to Richardson's death for a moment, a number of striking parallels are to be found in the film: the central couple are on a vacation (which is what she was doing at the time of her untimely demise),her character has two children (as she did in real-life),and the Walkens intended leaving Venice for Canada (the place of Richardson's fatal skiing accident)!!

Even on the sunniest and warmest of days in Venice the old buildings rising up out of the murky waters and the narrow alleyways that go nowhere, the place can give rise to a feeling of unease, of foreboding. Here, with a stark script by Harold Pinter from the sinister story of Ian McEwan we are presented with a rather desperate couple, brilliantly played by Richardson and Everett and their salvation is Christopher Walken. Add Helen Mirren to the mix and you have a perfectly cast and perfectly set uncanny tale that whilst you know is going nowhere good you share the fascination of the innocent couple as they stumble to disaster. Wonderful evocation of Venice and a most unsettling tale, excellent direction from Schrader and effective music from Badalamenti make this essential viewing for the broadminded.

Art movies often resemble sexploitation films with plusher production values, and the elegantly depraved Walken & Mirren in 'The Comfort of Strangers' strongly recall Bowie & Deneuve in 'The Hunger'. Some of the set pieces like Walken's picture gallery of photos of Rupert Everett could have come straight from an Italian 'giallo' of the seventies; while the conclusion would have been 'rationalised' by Jesús Franco as a vampiric rite rather than as the culmination of homoerotic infatuation.