Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
A tale about a happily married couple who would like to have children. Tracy teaches infants, Andy's a college professor. Things are never the same after she is taken to hospital and operated upon by Jed, a "know all" doctor.
Malice is a slick early-90s thriller with a genuinely surprising mid-film twist that recontextualizes everything before it, elevating the plot above typical genre fare. The cast — Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman — delivers solid, committed performances, with Baldwin's God-complex monologue being a standout moment. Cinematography is competent but unremarkable, standard for the era's studio thrillers. Novelty is limited; while the twist is effective, the film otherwise follows familiar neo-noir thriller conventions with insurance fraud and marital deception tropes well-trodden by the time of release. The ending ties things up adequately but loses some steam after the mid-film revelations.