PsychoSentimentality at the Movies

“What are you doing here? What do you want?” Sarah Cassidy (Neve Campbell) asks Alex (William H. Macy), conscience-stricken scion of a family of contract killers, in 2000 film Panic .”You,” Alex answers.

“Then what?” Sarah asks. It’s a great question. And she knows the answer: She knows Alex is married and has a precocious six-year-old son, Sammy, to whom he is devoted. She knows that Alex will use her and leave her where she was, confused and alone. Sarah’s already on the edge: The two met in a waiting room at a psychologist’s office. Though attracted to Alex, she knows that it can only end badly. She shows him the door.

But this is a movie, so Alex comes back. Sarah shows him the door again, but then, in desperation, puts her hand through a window. Alex rushes back in to help, and they make love on the floor of Sarah’s apartment.

Fortunately, the film doesn’t last long enough to turn into Fatal Attraction .

Alex kills his father when he begins to teach Sammy how to kill, and cop who’s following Alex shoots Alex. Sarah is spared the use-and-dump she knew was coming. In fact, she ends up a little stabler than she was before. She meets Alex’s wife in the waiting room at the psychologist’s office, where Sammy is having therapy to help him through the deaths of his father and grandfather. She seems almost happy.

Alex says that Sarah is the only person that makes him feel alive, and he dies with a slight smile on his face. A little fling stabilizes a neurotic bisexual woman and allows a middle-aged hit man to die happy. Heart-warming, cozy.

When psychology meets Hollywood, sentimentality is always the winner.