The unreliable narrator, as you’ll find in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), one of the earliest horror films, continues to fuel and inform horror storytelling 100 years later. Director Jennifer E. Montgomery, who co-wrote the script with Andrew Davis, injects the age-old cinematic device with a dose of adrenaline in her new film. This Tempting Madness refocuses the unreliable narrator lens to tackle themes of gaslighting, the male ego, fractured perspectives, and our own blurred sense of reality. When it comes to reusing narrative structure, Montgomery achieves a gripping tale about one young woman’s shattered agency and the lengths she’ll go to uncover the truth.
Mia (Simone Ashley) suffers a tragic accident during a party at her home and falls into a deep coma. When she awakens, her memories are like scattered glass. They only come back in glistening shards, bursts of images like a flip book. Her brother Ajay (Suraj Sharma) exhibits strangely aggressive control over her, forcing her to question his intentions. Her husband Jake (Austin Stowell) is being kept from her for reasons she doesn’t quite understand. Also, Mia can only see her daughter when supervised until she completely heals. To help, Mia attends frequent therapy sessions and slowly cracks open the past.
As her memory returns, Mia relives the moment she went tumbling from the second-floor balcony. Somehow, Jake plays an integral part in that unfortunate incident. Montgomery roots the store in very real human emotion. It also helps to have an actor of Ashley’s caliber digging into the script and unearthing rich complexity to Mia’s character, fleshing out the human condition around memory loss and recovery. The twists and turns collide with the actual series of events and lead to an explosive pay-off in the finale. Stowell’s performance also feeds into the manic nature of the story, often feeling drenched in psychosis and obsession.
This Tempting Madness burrows into the subconscious. It is, well, tempting to dismiss the film as a shallow exploration of collective memory and how we process tragedy. Jennifer E. Montgomery, however, invites the viewer to engage with the material on a deeply personal level. Mia’s journey reflects the gaslit woman trope, etched into horror through films such as Gaslight (1944), but it’s given a modern boost through her arc into becoming her own savior.
Montgomery doesn’t let these elements slow the pacing of the film. This Tempting Madness runs a brisk 92 minutes, and not a second is wasted on superfluous exposition or weird character choices. It’s a lean and mean horror/thriller that goes and goes until the fiery end ends it all. Mia emerges as a sharply written and gloriously flawed protagonist that the genre needs. By the time the credits roll, you’ll only be thinking about one thing: Simone Ashley’s performance.
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