Downloading Nancy
| Downloading Nancy | |
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Promotional film poster
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| Directed by | Johan Renck |
| Produced by | Jason Essex Cole Payne Igor Kovacevich David Moore |
| Written by | Pamela Cuming Lee Ross |
| Starring |
Maria Bello Jason Patric Rufus Sewell Amy Brenneman |
| Music by | Krister Linder |
| Cinematography | Christopher Doyle |
| Edited by | Henrik Hanson Johan Söderberg |
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Release date
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $20.000 |
Downloading Nancy is a 2008 drama film directed by Johan Renck, starring Maria Bello and Jason Patric. It is loosely based on the death of Sharon Lopatka who sought out someone who would torture her to death. The film premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize.
From the press release:
Dead to everything except painful pleasure, an unhappily married woman, Nancy, leaves her silent husband behind to meet a fellow broken soul in search of a final release. Louis is a quiet dispenser of pleasure, Nancy is the mechanism set to self-destruct. Beyond therapy, beyond medication, beyond feeling, Nancy is left with the only coping mechanism she ever knew, violence. Together, they journey through the darkest recesses of the human mind before finding solace in each other's arms. For Nancy, solace can only come from death, for Louis, it can only come from Nancy.
The film received mostly negative reviews, garnering a score of 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, which summarized it as "slickly made but mostly unpleasant".
Variety called the film a "forbidding and morbid piece of psycho-sadomasochism" with a "swimming-in-the-deep-end performance by Maria Bello that is the definition of fearless". It also notes:
Performances are cranked up to red-line neurotic levels, while production values intently contribute to creating an artificially bleak world where it's understandable scarcely anyone would want to spend time, even for the duration of this movie.
Salon.com, in a report about the films at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, wrote:
One film that will not be acquired by anybody at Sundance – I'll just crawl out on a limb with this one – is Downloading Nancy ... Bello's skin-peeling, ultra-depresso performance is wrenching and brave, calling for both emotional and physical nakedness. Can a film with those attributes also be insulting garbage? It's a difficult aesthetic-philosophical conundrum, but having sat through this damn thing I now have an answer.
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Wikipedia