Dr. Sarah Taylor, Rebecca De Mornay, is a guarded, aloof criminal psychologist who begins by interviewing a rapist client who pleads insanity. The case is not just a procedural drill for her; it unravels a past she has spent years sealing away. It becomes clear that she endured daily rapes as a child at the hands of her estranged father, who is now shown to be gravely ill. The revelation casts a long shadow over her present, hinting that her composure and clinical detachment are defenses built to survive a buried trauma.
One day in a bustling shopping mall, Sarah meets Tony Ramirez, Antonio Banderas, and a tentative romance starts to bloom. Tony’s charm lifts the veil of Sarah’s carefully guarded life, and she cautiously gives him her number. Yet the warmth is tempered by a persistent, unsettling undercurrent—the creepy advances of her neighbor Cliff, Dennis Miller, whom she once slept with, lingering in the background and adding tension to an already fragile balance.
As the relationship deepens, Sarah begins to receive death threats and increasingly disturbing gifts—dead flowers and other eerie tokens—that escalate in intensity as her feelings for Tony grow. When a beloved cat is dismembered, the fear intensifies, and Sarah goes to the police, determined to protect herself. She also hires a detective and has Tony tailed, a move she later discovers goes both ways: Tony is secretly investigating her, compiling a file that reveals personal history, including her mother’s death in a gun accident two decades earlier and a former boyfriend who disappeared. The intrusions pull back the curtain on a tangled web of secrets and suspicion, and Sarah learns that Tony isn’t just a sympathetic lover—he’s a man who wants answers, and his motives are murkier than they appear.
The film’s core twist centers on dissociative identity disorder, a condition born of long-suppressed trauma and manipulated memories from her father’s coercive past. Sarah’s alternate personality becomes the architect of the strange gifts and the weapon that kills her ex-boyfriend. When Tony travels to her father’s house, Sarah, under the control of this other persona, follows him and commits a double violence: she shoots and kills Tony there, and then kills her father as he intervenes. Only after the deed does she revert to her normal self, awakening with a fog of confusion. She does not remember the crucial events and suspects that Tony, in a fit of madness, killed her father, and that she herself killed Tony in what she believes to be self-defense.
The final social tremor of the film comes in the aftermath: the woman who awakens with no memory of the carnage contemplates a future that circles back to the same pattern of danger and complexity. In a stark and unsettling coda, Sarah appears to re-enter a relationship with Cliff, continuing a life where fear, secrecy, and control reshape every relationship she dares to form. This ending reinforces the film’s meditation on the fragility of memory, the weight of past abuse, and the ways in which the psyche can fracture under pressure, leaving the audience to wonder where the line between victim and perpetrator truly lies.
