‘You think you can be alive without taking risks…’
You know that a film is a proper grown-up film for adults if it features two middle-class couples engaging in wife-swapping. Think Indecent Proposal or The Ice Storm. Well, 1992’s Consenting Adults is in that arena, it also falls into the yuppie nightmare genre, AND it appears to be a very loose remake of Hitchcock’s classic Vertigo. Essentially, Alan J. Pakula’s thriller has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be…
Richard (Kevin Kline) and Priscilla Parker (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are living out a fulfilling if tedious suburban life. He writes jingles for advertisements, and she… I didn’t catch what she does. This film is very much focused on the male characters and their gaze. Everything is going fine until Eddy (Kevin Spacey) and Kay Otis (Rebecca Miller) move in across the street. Sure enough, it quickly becomes apparent that Eddy is after more than a neighbourly companion.
So far, so bland. What marks Consenting Adults apart from the many other thrillers from the same era is that halfway through it abandons the wife swap angle to perform an insane pivot into something else entirely. This change in mood is incredibly abrupt, and therefore, utterly jarring, and much of your enjoyment of this movie will depend on your ability to make peace with the twist. I found it pretty exciting, but it does also dissipate the tension somewhat so that the second half of the movie is a bit of a letdown. That being said, Kline is great and also sports a great moustache, and Miller makes for a suitably icy femme fatale. Spacey is a little too sleazy as the neighbour from hell, but that’s what you always get from Spacey, it is up to the director to channel that into something watchable.
Consenting Adults would be just another ’90s thriller without the second-act twist, but even with that shocking about-turn, it’s still pretty rote and by the book. One for genre fans only.