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Poster for The Public Woman

The Public Woman

1984 · 113 min

A slow, unsettling plunge into obsession and blurred reality, demanding and dark, with an erotic charge and a lingering sense of dread.

Genres
Drama
Overview
An inexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky's 'The Possessed'. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assassination.

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Genres
Drama
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How it feels

Written by AI. It can be wrong.

Tone
  • darkstrength 3 of 3
  • tensestrength 2 of 3
  • eeriestrength 2 of 3
  • melancholicstrength 1 of 3
Pacing
slow-burn, 1 of 4, from slow-burn to relentless
Attention
demanding, 4 of 4, from background-friendly to demanding
Themes
  • obsession
  • identity
  • madness
  • betrayal
  • politics
Places
  • big city
  • workplace
Era
contemporary
Audience
adult
Form
  • unreliable narrator
Content intensity
  • Gore none
  • Language mild
  • Violence mild
  • Sex strong
All scales, 0 to 10
Scales, 0 to 10
ScaleValue0 to 10
Action2
Horror3
Humour1
Realism7
Romance3
Tension7
Darkness8
Complexity8
Emotional weight8

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Cast

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