Once the gears of Potter's melodramatic plot start into motion, though, it becomes little more than
an over-the-top soap opera, in which current affairs and past sexual trysts are revealed, relationships falls apart, a terminal diagnosis comes to light, and the gun goes through a series of motions to wind up in the hands that held it at the movie's start.
One can't help but imagine what a different filmmaker might have made of this lurid, plot - hole - riddled
soap opera with a body count (including a perfect
over-the-top image of bourgeois degeneracy: murder by wine corkscrew) or the character of Rachel, a bad drunk whose list of past humiliations includes an incident in which she stumbled into the Watsons» house in an apparent attempt to kidnap their infant daughter.