Review: Allure

An often unsettling and unrelentingly grim portrait of how the abused becomes the abuser, Allure features a trenchant performance from Evan Rachel Wood as Laura, a thirty-ish house cleaner soon enmeshed in a dangerous affair.

Laura is first introduced in a hotel room having sex with a blindfolded stranger, who flees when the encounter becomes too violent for his liking. Laura is clearly damaged and there's a strong suggestion that her relationship with her father/boss William (Denis O'Hare) may be the cause for her self-destructive nature. There's a palpable uneasiness in their exchanges - at first, one thinks it's because the aimless Laura depends on him for financial support, but the way she stiffens her shoulders at his touch indicates otherwise.

Theirs is not the only strained parent-child relation. Eva (Julia Sarah Stone) is sixteen, slowly being crushed under the weight of her mother's (Maxim Roy) expectations. Then there's her mother's decision to sell their house so they can move in with her new boyfriend and his son. So when Laura is hired to clean Eva's house, it's no surprise when Eva begins to warm to Laura's attention. It's also believable when Eva decides to take up Laura's offer to stay at her place since it offers Eva a chance to make her own choices regarding her own life, though the teenager has yet to realise that she is about to trade in one prison for another.

Yet it's at this point when Allure begins to strain credibility. It's difficult to swallow the events that unfold, though both Wood and Stone do excellent work keying in to their characters' psychologies. One completely understands how Eva could view Laura as a refuge from her domineering mother, though not necessarily why she would feel so beholden to Laura when things take a darker turn. One can empathise with how Laura sees Eva's situation as similar to the one she herself has undergone, and one can accept how Laura's past abuse manifests itself in her desperate and craven behaviour. However, despite Wood and Stone's best efforts, there's no overcoming the film's implausibilities.

On the technical side, Allure does benefit from the visual atmospherics created by Carlos and Jason Sanchez, the Montreal-based sibling photographers making their feature film debut.

Allure

Directed by: Carlos Sanchez, Jason Sanchez

Written by: Carlos Sanchez, Jason Sanchez

Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Julia Sarah Stone, Denis O'Hare, Maxim Roy