Till Death is a slick film with a two-part prelude: First, Emma ends her extramarital affair with an attorney who works for the firm headed by her husband. Next, she celebrates – or rather, guiltily endures – an expensive 10th anniversary dinner with said husband, following which she is driven to their wintry, secluded lakeside cabin.
These opening segments maintain an impressive dramatic tension as we (along with Emma) question whether Mark suspects her fling. The shoe drops as she awakens the next morning to find herself handcuffed to him, just before he mouths, “It's time to wake up” to her and puts a bullet in his head.
The title resonates: The self-inflicted shot ends Mark’s life along with their failing marriage. But Mark has structured both terminal events with a carefully constructed revenge Read more...
Till Death is a slick film with a two-part prelude: First, Emma ends her extramarital affair with an attorney who works for the firm headed by her husband. Next, she celebrates – or rather, guiltily endures – an expensive 10th anniversary dinner with said husband, following which she is driven to their wintry, secluded lakeside cabin.
These opening segments maintain an impressive dramatic tension as we (along with Emma) question whether Mark suspects her fling. The shoe drops as she awakens the next morning to find herself handcuffed to him, just before he mouths, “It's time to wake up” to her and puts a bullet in his head.
The title resonates: The self-inflicted shot ends Mark’s life along with their failing marriage. But Mark has structured both terminal events with a carefully constructed revenge plot: the misery is only beginning for Emma and their mutual bond is now unbreakable. The widow is chained to her husband’s corpse; he is a dead weight blocking her getaway.
Nor is it just a matter of calling 911, dragging his bulk into the car, or chopping her way free of him, since Mark pre-engineered the setting quite thoughtfully and thoroughly. Most of the action takes places in the claustrophobic cabin or just outside on the frozen lake surfaced with a dangerously thin layer of ice.
But for a receptionist in the law office and a waitress in the restaurant, Emma is the sole female character, and every male character, her foe. Her lover might not be precisely a villain, but he isn’t much help either. When he arrives on site, his immediate concern is not Emma’s safety, but whether they can still keep their affair secret. And he is at least partly to blame for the dalliance which leads to Emma’s predicament.
There are a few quibbles: Why does Mark insist on blindfolding Emma on their long drive to their cabin? It’s not like she isn’t familiar with its layout and precise location.
And for those lucky few who have spent as much time as I have pushing their luck with late-spring ice fishing, the physics of thin ice were misrepresented.
Till Death is worth watching till the end.
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92%
5.8
