An intense thriller

MALICE starts out on the campus of a New England college, with the rape and physical attack of one of the coeds attending that college. Bill Pullman, an administrator at this college, is brought into the loop to help investigate this and a series of other attacks there.

Alec Baldwin is a surgeon who comes to the East Coast town in which Pullman and Nicole Kidman, married to each other on-screen, live. It quickly becomes apparent that Baldwin and Pullman are acquainted with each other; they seem to become quite close as the movie progresses, to the point where Pullman, at Kidman's behest, rents Baldwin the entire upstairs floor of their house, despite the fact that the house itself needs major work. (In fact, the idea of Baldwin's living with them is presented as a way of supplementing Pullman's meager college-professor salary. The house needs something like ten thousand dollars' worth of plumbing work, and they need to get the money from somewhere; if Baldwin lives there long enough, he will pay them enough rent money to make it easy for them to afford the plumbing work.)

Then Kidman, while trying to have a baby, develops problems. Sudden pain in her abdomen crops up, and Pullman rushes her to the emergency room, where Baldwin operates on her, and removes what turns out to be a normal set of female reproductive organs (including the ovaries). Kidman, of course, sues Baldwin for all he's worth, getting more than she seemingly bargained for from Baldwin's malpractice insurance carrier when it turns out that she was indeed pregnant without knowing it.

This is where things start to get hairy, and if I reveal much more, I will spoil the entire plot. It can be said, however, that Bebe Neuwirth, playing a local detective investigating the series of rapes I mentioned earlier, finds out (by way of requesting a bodily-fluid sample) that Pullman is infertile and, therefore, cannot have been the father of Kidman's child. (By now, Pullman himself is suspected of being the attacker. The evidence provided by the bodily-fluid sample exonerates him.)

At this point, Pullman starts to do a little investigating. Through Kidman's lawyer Peter Gallagher, Pullman finds out that the mother-in-law he thought dead is not only alive, but willing (for the price of a decent bottle of Scotch) to give out more than enough detail for Pullman to find out what the real scoop is.

MALICE is very suspenseful indeed. The theatrical trailers I'd seen before I'd gone to see it in a local bargain theater led me to believe that this was a straightforward malpractice case, with the deposition in the trailer being the emotional high point of the film, and the civil litigation itself being the climax (if you'll pardon the NC-17 pun). Instead, when Kidman and Baldwin take a walk on the beach after she won her lawsuit, the viewer is shocked to see them together talking. (I'm not going to say what they are talking about. If you've seen the film already, you know what the topic of discussion is.) The viewer is literally led down the garden path until such time as the writers and producers choose to reveal the whole truth about what everyone in the film is up to.

One of the more ironic inside jokes of the film involves the next-door neighbor's child. All throughout the beginning of the film, while Kidman seems to be struggling to get pregnant by Pullman, she is afraid of what this child might find out simply by seeing into her bedroom. Suffice it to say that one finds out, at the end of MALICE, that this little boy absorbs less information than she might think.

MALICE is especially recommended for those who might enjoy a good medical thriller. Kidman, Pullman and Baldwin also deserve mention for chilling, suspenseful and convincing performances.