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Felicia's Journey [DVD] [Widescreen] [2000] [Region 1]

1 disc
Region 1 USA/CA (info)

Stumbling through the beautifully rendered industrial Midlands, England, in clunky platform shoes, hair fashioned in a childlike ponytail, the young Irish Felicia (Cassidy) plows along in search of the boyfriend who impregnated her and promised to write. Along the way she meets the kindly, middle-aged Joseph Hilditch who offers to help her find her love. However, all is not as it seems--the mild-mannered catering manager of a large factory is, in fact, unhinged. As the story unfolds we follow his attempts to befriend and earn the trust of the guileless Felicia--who, as a product of Irish old world superstition and family dysfunction (a world that Egoyan reveals in sparing yet memorably atmospheric glimpses) is utterly clueless as to his motives. Hilditch, played with a creepy undercurrent intensity by Hoskins, also manages to be truly sympathetic at the same time. A bachelor, he obsessively and ritualistically prepares torturously detailed meals for himself--instructed via videotapes of an old TV cooking program hosted by his late, overbearing French mother, who had forced her unattractive, socially graceless and unwilling young son to be her guinea pig. The legacy of his mother's effect on him is revealed in Hilditch's own precise, neurotic focus on cooking; and in a quiet sub-hobby--meeting and befriending young women who eventually disappear from his life. The film chronicles his latest "relationship" with the singular Felicia.
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- Rating - Mature Thematic Elements and Related Disturbing Images
Additional Info

Manufacturer Part Number (MPN): 10134
Credits

Bob Hoskins, Elaine Cassidy, Arsinee Khanjian, Peter McDonald, Gerard McSorley
Critic Reviews

"...A haunting film....[A] hypnotic blend of mirth and mayhem..."
Rolling Stone
"...A film that, satisfyingly, gives more complex signals than we might at first suspect....FELICIA'S JOURNEY seems Hitchcockian from the start..."
Sight and Sound
"...Egoyan pokes into his favorite pits of sexual darkness, spiritual hunger, and human disconnectedness..." -- Rating: B+
Entertainment Weekly
"...Hard to forget....The film sustains a mood of heightened consciousness..."
New York Times
"...Aided by a uniformly superb cast, Egoyan triumphs in a pared-down film that makes chillingly expressive use of his signature themes....Surprising deftness and originality..." -- 4 out of 5 stars
Box Office
"...Atom Egoyan capably finesses the personal, political and even the macabre in FELICIA's JOURNEY....It lingers in the mind for days..."
USA Today
"...Egoyan is such a devious director, achieving his effects at a level below the surface....It's as if his films inject material into our subconscious, and hours later, like a slow reaction in a laboratory retort, they heat up and bubble over..."
Chicago Sun-Times