Metacritic Film

Felicia's Journey

Starring Claire Benedict, Brid Brennan, Elaine Cassidy, and Sidney Cole

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for mature thematic elements and related disturbing images

Artisan Entertainment
Suspense/Thriller
116 minutes | Color
Canada / UK
Released In Theaters November 12, 1999

A young woman (Cassidy) travels to England from Ireland to find her boyfriend (McDonald). She is befriended by a lonely middle-aged catering manager (Hoskins) who it turns out has befriended and abused more than a dozen young women.

WRITTEN BY
Atom Egoyan
William Trevor (novel)

DIRECTED BY
Atom Egoyan

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

72 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 Chicago Tribune
A rare example of a literary film that preserves the best of its source while creatively filling up on it.
100 Baltimore Sun
Compulsion, self-deception and the slippery nature of evil are explored with fidelity and supreme control .
100 Christian Science Monitor
Egoyan's cinematic brilliance shows up intermittently in this atmospheric thriller, which gains most of its punch from Hoskins's surprisingly subtle performance.
90 Washington Post
So elegantly layered and emotionally restrained, it makes the horror at its center all the more disturbing.
88 Philadelphia Inquirer
In this, Alfred Hitchcock's centenary year, Felicia's Journey so startlingly channels the obsessions of the late director that it might be the greatest Hitchcock movie the master of suspense never made.
88 Chicago Sun-Times
You leave Felicia's Journey appreciating it. A week later, you're astounded by it.
83 Entertainment Weekly
Like a dowser who can divine hidden sources of water, Atom Egoyan has a talent for locating the dream-state perversity that runs just under the surface of everyday life;
83 Portland Oregonian
In this film, shadowy seams of brutality, loss and grief are traced beneath bright layers of tree boughs, children's laughter and high, empty windows.
80 The New York Times
Visually, and in its soundtrack of overlapping voices, the film sustains a mood of heightened consciousness.
80 Film.com
It's an Egoyan film, and therefore by definition worth seeing.
80 TV Guide
Newcomer Cassidy is excellent, and Hoskins gives a flawless performance.
80 Los Angeles Times
One of the year's riskiest yet most effective films.
75 San Francisco Examiner
The success of Felicia's Journey lies in the work of the steady and here understated Hoskins, who gives one of his best performances, and young Cassidy, who displays a weary maturity even through her deer-in-the-headlights character.
75 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Has difficulty reaching a resolution. In the final half-hour, the film becomes almost hysterically out of sync with its prior quiet reserve.
75 New York Daily News
Seems like a genteel "Psycho."
75 USA Today
A chilly oddball that's easier to admire than love.
75 Charlotte Observer
Deep as a Canadian lake: Below the placid surface, menacing creatures swim around unseen.
75 San Francisco Chronicle
There's tremendous maturity and skill in Felicia's Journey but also a sense of impending horror that's bound to repel some audience members -- even though the violence is all implied.
75 Miami Herald
All of Egoyan's movies have revolved around characters with damaged, fragile psyches, but rarely have they been illustrated as deftly -- and as gracefully -- as in Felicia's Journey.
70 Variety
Mounted as an art film and is likely to divide both critics and the helmer's fans.
70 Village Voice
Egoyan, whose sophisticated eye is connected to a brain that seems, for the moment, to have gone dead.
70 Dallas Observer
As far from crowd-pleasing as you're going to get these days.
70 Film.com
Egoyan and Hoskins fans will definitely want to see this film. Others will feel their fingernails grow as they watch it.
70 Chicago Reader
Everything seems to fall into place according to earlier Egoyan films, which suggests that you're likelier to enjoy this one if you haven't seen the others.
70 Salon.com
As is typical with Egoyan, the structure is complicated and the layers of cinematic technique and texture are even more so.
67 Austin Chronicle
In this instance Egoyan's hereafter is a pale imitation of his yesterday.
63 New York Post
But given the potentially gripping subject matter, the film is fatally underedited: Every scene feels too long.
61 Mr. Showbiz
It's yet another serial killer movie, a plot element that by this point in time, far from being disturbing or fascinating, is just plain dull.
60 TNT RoughCut
Haunting character study filled with fascinating personalities, robust images, and eccentric behaviors that will please art-house fans.
60 Slate
Apart from a few choice flashbacks, the action is crawlingly linear--and opaque.
60 Film.com
Intelligent thriller--turns-- into an embarrassing gothic horror show.
50 Boston Globe
Has more ambition than the usual serial killer film, but curiously less urgency.
50 LA Weekly
As with all of Egoyan's films, this new one comes cloaked in an atmosphere of dread, but for the first time there's no real purpose, intellectual or emotional, to all the free-floating anxiety.
40 Time
A movie this implausible shouldn't be this dull.

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