Any time a movie starts with something akin to “based on true events… names have been changed,” you know you’re gonna be in for a ride. Psychological thriller This Tempting Madness begs the question of if we can believe our own memories when love, family, and physical injury cloud our judgement.
After emerging from a coma with serious injuries and memory gaps, a woman’s husband is jailed. As she works to reconstruct her past, she begins to doubt herself and what is real.
This Tempting Madness, IMDB
We start with Mia (Simone Ashley) in a freefall, monologuing to herself as we abruptly cut to blurred vision and doctors speaking about catastrophic damage. She awakes from her coma to the news that she had been pushed off of a balcony, presumably by her husband Jake (Austin Stowell). While Mia recovers in the hospital and later at home, she suffers delusions as she tries to recount what happened that night. Meanwhile Jake is awaiting trial, and her family’s concern pushes a wedge between both her and them, as well as her and Jake. She can’t trust her memories and everyone else seems to have some stake in whether he goes to prison for attempted murder or not.
This Tempting Madness has psychological warfare written all over it. I can see how incredibly frustrating it must be to slowly piece together fragments of stories that may or may not be true, all of it told from people who weren’t there and wouldn’t know the deep, personal lives of you and your spouse. Mia shifts back and forth from a hurt individual just trying to save her marriage and get back to normal life and a woman consumed by rage. Her outbursts are understandable, but only hurt her and her loved ones. It’s the story of an unreliable narrator, where all options of what really happened are twisted to lean a certain way, to mask someone’s intentions.
And while This Tempting Madness takes us on a ride through their perfect-yet-fraught marriage, we too are pulled in both directions. We can empathize with Mia while also kicking the walls at her inability to see what has really happened. She may be healing from her coma and multiple life-saving surgeries, but she is also transforming into a shell of her former self, something that puts her in serious danger towards the climax.
This Tempting Madness may feed us pieces of story that we have to take with a grain of salt, but it is overall easy to figure out, making it all the more interesting. The symbol of two snakes eating each other comes up multiple times, signaling how Mia and Jake may be one in the same, forever biting at each other until they’re both gone. And as she is here dealing with an extremely close call, the stress of it all hits her like a truck; this film is more about the internal, emotional pain than it ever was about the physical.
This Tempting Madness is exactly what the title implies — wanting so badly to believe everything will be alright and that your worst thoughts aren’t reality, but realizing they are in fact the opposite. Tension-heavy with a core of heartache, this film plays out a story of what happens when our hopes and dreams fail, and what happens to those who can’t withstand that failure. It makes us question our own relationships with those we love, and if we could withstand such animosity — and possible attempted murder — from them. This Tempting Madness expresses the duality of people, the heart against the mind, and both against others.
This Tempting Madness is now playing in select theaters.
