So the setup here is that Julia Roberts is married to an abusive rich asshole. The movie is super not subtle about the level of abuse going on here, which is foreshadowing for the movie’s level of subtlety about literally everything.

And so by chance, a neighbor happens to invite Julia and Shitbird to go for a ride on his sailboat on what’s supposed to be a beautiful, calm night. A storm comes up, and Julia fakes her death in what is honestly a ridiculously implausible way — not only does it require like five separate coincidences to allow her plan to work, but it also requires her to have basically been planning a criminal mastermind heist. But then while she’s making her getaway, she does a handful of obviously stupid things where the audience is like “YOU’RE GOING TO GET FOUND OUT, DON’T DO THIS.”

Having faked her death, she runs away to Iowa, and here’s where the movie gets really terrible, because what happens is: She meets this guy, Ben, who the movie clearly wants you to think is a really great guy and perfect for her, but who is in fact a fucking creepy weirdo who is sending off piles of red flags.

Like, their “meet cute” is that she’s picking apples off a tree that’s in his yard, and Ben sidles up to her and accuses her of stealing them, and escalates into saying he might call the police, and even as she’s visibly growing more uncomfortable with this, then is all leeringly “but maybe we can make a deal for these apples.” Julia throws the apples to the ground and is like ‘NOPE” and this is the 100% correct reaction, but then Ben comes to her back door with the apples and is like “hey, I was just joking around, can’t you take a joke” and we’re supposed to believe that the problem is that Julia is too tightly wound from her trauma, not that he was being a creepy weirdo who either can’t read social cues or was deliberately ignoring them to put her off-balance.

Later, they go on a date, and they come back and start kissing, and he’s getting aggressive about escalating. Which, he knows by this time that she came out of a super-traumatic abusive relationship so you feel like basic common sense/decency would be to be very non-aggro and to ensure that she’s okay with everything, but that’s not how Ben rolls apparently. But it gets worse: She starts to panic and is like “no, stop it” and she has to repeat this four times, and then physically push him away before he stops. At which point, Ben looks at her pityingly and is like “boy, he really did a number on you.” No, Ben, the problem is that you are yourself a boundary-violating, consent-ignoring, abusive shitbird, and your attempt to blame her for that is really the cherry on a shit sundae.

But the movie disagrees, and still thinks he’s awesome, which I just genuinely am amazed sometimes at how presumably there were dozens of people who saw this scene and somehow weren’t like “idk, this doesn’t seem like it’s setting the right heroic tone for Ben, maybe we should change this scene so he’s not sexually assaulting her?”

But then, maybe I’m just failing to account for the times. Roger Ebert, in a scathing contemporary review of this movie, is all “There are some well-handled scenes in Iowa, including the gradual steps by which she learns to trust her next-door neighbor, a drama teacher played warmly and effectively by Kevin Anderson.” Even weirder is a Rita Kempley review in the Washington Post, where she says:

Written by Ronald Bass, who won an Oscar for “Rain Man,” this prosaic screenplay is Bass’s notion, and probably Ruben’s, that women nowadays want men to be fuzzy toy bears. Given her druthers, Laura naturally takes the cuddly collegiate over the one-dimensional land shark. But only these guys would imagine that Ben, who is positively ulcerating with thoughtfulness, could be attractive to women. It provides plenty of reason to call the Alan Alda Emergency Hot Line, with gooey Ben inclined to say things like “I don’t know how to feel how I’m feeling” and then burn the pot roast. That’s not to say bring on the Neanderthals, just some real men.

So, uh, welp. I guess that’s 1991 for you.

Anyway, since the movie thinks Ben is great, the main conflict it’s actually setting up is that her shitbird husband begins to find clues that she’s not dead (including some of those “NO DON’T DO THAT” things from earlier). He traces down Julia’s mom (who is in a nursing home), and then when Julia goes to visit, he sees through her thin skullduggery and tracks her down. He then engages in implausible psychological terror games with her (like, really, he broke into your house and spent time rearranging the cupboards? Really?), and then they have a big showdown where Ben saves her and then she ultimately shoots her husband, and now everyone can live happily ever after, the end.

This isn’t a good movie, and the main redeeming feature of it is that it’s got a moody Jerry Goldsmith score (and of course Julia Roberts is a compelling star, though it’s tbh a little weird seeing her at 24 when I’m used to her as a full-grown adult). Oh, and the other redeeming feature is that it keeps reminding me of ’90s-era SportsCenter, and Chris Berman’s nickname for running back Eric “Sleeping With” Bieniemy. Still and all, I cannot recommend it.